One of Dulles critics was author of "The Power Elite," C. Wright Mills 1956
Dulles knew many of the central players in the secretive Swiss financial milieu because he and his brother had worked with them as clients or business partners before the war. Sullivan and Cromwell, the Dulles brothers’ Wall Street law firm, was at the center of an intricate international network of banks, investment firms, and industrial conglomerates that rebuilt Germany after World War I. Foster, the law firm’s top executive, grew skilled at structuring the complex merry-go-round of transactions that funneled massive U.S. investments into German industrial giants like the IG Farben chemical conglomerate and Krupp Steel. The profits generated by these investments then flowed to France and Britain in the form of war reparations, and then back to the United States to pay off war loans.
Foster Dulles became so deeply enmeshed in the lucrative revitalization of Germany that he found it difficult to separate his firm’s interests from those of the rising economic and military power—even after Hitler consolidated control over the country in the 1930s. Foster continued to represent German cartels like IG Farben as they were integrated into the Nazis’ growing war machine, helping the industrial giants secure access to key war materials. He donated money to America First, the campaign to keep the United States out of the gathering tempest in Europe, and helped sponsor a rally honoring Charles Lindbergh, the fair-haired aviation hero who had become enchanted by Hitler’s miraculous revival of Germany. Foster refused to shut down the Berlin office of Sullivan and Cromwell—whose attorneys were forced to sign their correspondence “Heil Hitler”—until his partners (including Allen), fearful of a public relations disaster, insisted he do so. When Foster finally gave in—at an extremely tense 1935 partners’ meeting in the firm’s lavish offices at 48 Wall Street—he broke down in tears.
Foster still could not bring himself to cut off his former Berlin law partner, Gerhardt Westrick, when he showed up in New York in August 1940 to lobby on behalf of the Third Reich. Setting himself up in an opulent Westchester County estate, Westrick invited influential New York society types for weekend parties, taking the opportunity to subject them to his pro-Hitler charm offensive. Westrick’s guest lists were dominated by oil executives because he was particularly keen on ensuring the continued flow of fuel supplies to Germany, despite the British embargo. The lobbyist finally went too far—even by the hospitable standards of the New York society set—when he had the gall to throw a gala party at the Waldorf-Astoria on June 26, 1940, to celebrate the Nazi defeat of France. Westrick’s shameless audacity created an uproar in the New York press, but Foster rushed to the Nazi promoter’s defense, insisting he had “a high regard for his integrity.”
Until late in the day, Foster harbored sympathy for the devil himself, Adolf Hitler. Even after the Nazi regime pushed through the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and unleashed waves of terror against Germany’s Jewish population, Foster clung to a sympathetic view of the Führer. He could not help being impressed by a man “who from humble beginnings . . . has attained the unquestioned leadership of a great nation,” Foster told a friend in 1937. By 1939, Eustace Seligman—a Jewish senior partner at Sullivan and Cromwell—had become so fed up with Foster’s position on Nazi Germany that he confronted his boss, telling Foster he was hurting the firm’s reputation by publicly suggesting “that Germany’s position is morally superior to that of the Allies.”
Like his brother, Allen Dulles was slow to grasp the malevolence of Hitler’s regime. Dulles met face-to-face with Hitler in the Führer’s Berlin office in March 1933. He was ostensibly on a fact-finding mission to Europe for President Roosevelt, but Dulles was particularly interested in determining what Hitler’s rise meant for his law firm’s corporate clients in Germany and the United States. As Dulles subsequently informed Foster, he did not find Hitler particularly alarming. And he was “rather impressed” with Joseph Goebbels, remarking on the Nazi propaganda chief’s “sincerity and frankness.” After Dulles and fellow U.S. statesman Norman Davis returned to the Adlon, their luxury hotel across from the Brandenburg Gate, Davis was unnerved to find the word “Juden” scrawled crudely on the door of his room, even though he was not Jewish. “The conditions are not quite as bad” as anxious reports about Hitler would indicate, Dulles nonetheless wrote Foster from Germany.
By the late 1930s, Dulles’s views finally shifted and he came to dismiss Nazi leaders as “those mad people in control in Germany.” He grew increasingly certain that the United States must prepare for an inevitable showdown with Hitler. But, out of deference to Foster, Allen was reluctant to make his opinions public. He also continued to do business with the Nazi financial and industrial network, joining the board of J. Henry Schroder Bank, the U.S. subsidiary of a London bank that Time magazine in 1939 called “an economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis.” And Allen and his wife, Clover, continued to socialize with the Lindberghs, who were their neighbors on Long Island’s Gold Coast shore. (Lindbergh, enamored of Hitler, noted in his diary that he and Dulles “have somewhat similar views in a number of instances.”)
Even after Dulles was recruited into the OSS by Donovan in October 1941, his loyalties were still questioned by some administration officials, including Roosevelt himself. Dulles’s various financial connections to the Nazi regime prompted FDR to place the Wall Street lawyer under close surveillance when he began working in the OSS’s thirty-sixth-floor suite in Rockefeller Center. Monitoring Dulles proved an easy task since he shared office space with a massive British spy operation run by legendary Canadian secret agent William Stephenson, who would become famous as the “Man Called Intrepid.” At one point, Stephenson’s Rockefeller Center operation—which was tucked away under the colorless name British Security Coordination—grew to as many as three thousand employees. It was a remarkably ambitious covert enterprise, particularly considering that England was operating on friendly soil.
Stephenson had been sent to the United States in 1940 by his enthusiastic patron, Winston Churchill—Britain’s newly elected prime minister—after the evacuation of British forces from the beaches of Dunkirk. With Hitler’s forces overrunning Europe and turning their gaze toward an increasingly isolated England, Churchill knew that his nation’s only hope was to maneuver the United States into the war. Roosevelt was a strong supporter of the British cause, but with as much as 80 percent of the American public against entering the European war and Congress equally opposed, both FDR and Churchill realized it would take a major propaganda offensive to sway the nation.
The British government and the Roosevelt White House faced not only a deeply wary American public with understandable concerns about the costs of war, but a well-financed appeasement lobby with strong links to Nazi Germany. With the fate of nations at stake, the shadow war in America grew increasingly ruthless. Churchill made it clear that he was quite willing to engage in what he euphemistically called “ungentlemanly warfare” to save his nation—and he enjoyed Roosevelt’s firm support.
Stephenson—Britain’s point man in the underground war against Nazi Germany on American soil—was a suave operator, with a flair for hosting lively cocktail parties at his penthouse suite in midtown Manhattan’s Dorset Hotel. But, like James Bond—the fictional spy partly modeled on Stephenson by his colleague Ian Fleming—Stephenson was also willing to do the dirty work of espionage. The slim, slight Stephenson, who arrived in New York at the age of forty-four, had the springy step of the boxer he once was—and the smooth self-assurance of the self-made millionaire he had become. He proved an adept practitioner of the black arts of espionage, working his far-flung press contacts in America to expose Nazi front companies—including some of the Dulles brothers’ corporate clients—and pressuring Washington to deport Nazi lobbyists. Stephenson’s operatives also undertook a variety of black-bag operations, such as breaking into the Spanish embassy in Washington, where they stole the secret codes for diplomatic messages flowing between General Francisco Franco’s fascist government and Berlin.
Stephenson was even authorized to kill members of the Nazi network in the United States—including German agents and pro-Hitler American businessmen—using British assassination teams. One of the men considered for elimination was none other than Dulles business partner Gerhardt Westrick. (The big-spending Hitler lobbyist was eventually simply deported.) It was this decidedly ungentlemanly Stephenson tactic that inspired Fleming to grant his hero “the license to kill.”
Fleming was a great admirer of Stephenson, whom he called “a magnetic personality” and “one of the great secret agents” of World War II. The novelist, who worked with Stephenson’s operation as a British naval intelligence agent in Washington, also praised the spymaster’s martinis—which he served in quart glasses—as “the most powerful in America.” But as Fleming himself observed, even his fictional hero James Bond was “not in fact a hero—but an efficient and not very attractive blunt instrument in the hands of government.”
Years later, when James Jesus Angleton and William K. Harvey—two legends of U.S. counterintelligence—were searching for assassins to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, they sought advice from a British colleague named Peter Wright. “Have you thought of approaching Stephenson?” Wright suggested. “A lot of the old-timers say he ran this kind of thing in New York during the war.”
President Roosevelt was well aware that the Dulleses were at the center of Wall Street and Republican Party opposition to his presidency. The brothers, as top legal advisers to America’s business royalty, were the very symbols of the “plutocracy” that the president railed against when giving vent to his populist passions. The fact that they were also linked to Nazi financial interests only deepened Roosevelt’s suspicions.
While FDR himself was adept at hiding his true political feelings behind a mask of charm, there were some New Deal loyalists who openly expressed the deep enmity between the Roosevelt and Dulles camps. One such firebrand was William O. Douglas, the progressive young lawyer President Roosevelt put in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the newly formed Wall Street watchdog agency, and later appointed a justice of the Supreme Court. As FDR’s top Wall Street regulator, Douglas had more than one occasion to cross swords with Foster. Years later, Douglas’s hatred for the “unctuous and self-righteous” senior Dulles brother still reverberated in the New Dealer’s memoir. Foster carried himself like a “high churchman,” observed Douglas. But in reality, he was the kind of “predatory” Wall Street shill “who for a fee would stand for almost anything.” If the John Foster Dulleses of America were destined for heaven—as men of his ilk were always utterly certain—then Douglas would rather end up in hell. “I could perhaps endure [men like Foster] for an evening. But to sit on a cloud with [them] through eternity would be to exact too great a price.”
Though FDR shared the Dulles crowd’s privileged background, the president felt much more in tune with men like Douglas, the product of a hardscrabble childhood in Washington’s Yakima Valley, where he had grown up picking fruit to help support his family. Brilliant and hard-driven, Douglas worked his way through Columbia University Law School. One of the talented law school graduate’s first job interviews was with Foster Dulles at Sullivan and Cromwell. But Foster was so “pontifical” that Douglas decided against joining the firm. “In fact,” he recalled, “I was so struck by [Foster’s] pomposity that when he helped me on with my coat, as I was leaving his office, I turned and gave him a quarter tip.”
After joining the Roosevelt administration at the age of thirty-five, Douglas quickly developed a reputation as a rising New Deal star, taking over as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from Joseph P. Kennedy in 1937 and becoming a fixture in the president’s inner circle. A frequent weekend guest at Camp David, the presidential retreat that was widely known in those years as Shangri-la, Douglas solidified his position with the president by learning to perfect a dry martini, FDR’s favorite cocktail.
Roosevelt grew so fond of Douglas that in 1944, while pondering running mates for his fourth presidential run, he briefly considered his young SEC chairman. Douglas was an energetic New Dealer, FDR reminded a group of Democratic Party bosses who had gathered in the White House to advise him on the decision. Besides, he noted, Douglas played a stimulating game of poker. But the political bosses were not as enamored of Douglas as the president. They were well aware that announcing a Roosevelt-Douglas ticket would set off a bombshell on Wall Street.
While serving with the SEC, Douglas had become a scourge of the financial industry. Bankers and lawyers accustomed to the hushed privacy of wood-paneled suites and private dining rooms were yanked before public hearings presided over by Douglas and his sharp young staff and forced to account for their business practices. Even Robert Swaine of the white-shoe law firm Cravath—who had once been Douglas’s boss—got the full treatment. “You stood me on my head and shook all the fillings out of my teeth,” he later told Douglas.
With his craggy Western good looks and lean, outdoorsman’s build, Douglas seemed cut out to be a populist hero—an everyman Gary Cooper taking on pompous big shots like the ones played by Edward Arnold in Frank Capra movies. And stuffed-shirt John Foster Dulles was his perfect nemesis. Douglas once put Foster on the witness stand for two full days, grilling him about the fortune that he had reaped for his law firm by managing a sketchy bankruptcy procedure that had fleeced a multitude of creditors. The high and mighty Foster had squirmed on the stand like a pontiff forced “to do business with the underworld,” recalled Douglas.
By siccing men like William O. Douglas on men like John Foster Dulles, President Roosevelt drove the plutocracy mad. J. P. Morgan Jr. was so incensed by the “class traitor” FDR that his servants had to cut out the president’s picture from the Wall Street titan’s morning newspaper for fear that it would spike his blood pressure. The class hatred against Roosevelt even resulted in at least two abortive coups against his presidency. In 1934, a group of Wall Street plotters—financed by wealthy Roosevelt enemies (and Dulles clients) like the Du Ponts—tried to recruit Marine war hero General Smedley Butler to lead an armed march on Washington. In 1940, newspaperman and socialite Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.—one of FDR’s few friends in the New York club set—tipped off Eleanor Roosevelt to another anti-Roosevelt plot he had heard being hatched in his Fifth Avenue circles, involving tycoons as well as army officers.
The First Lady was among those who wondered about the wisdom of allowing someone like Allen Dulles to set up spy operations in war-torn Europe, where he was certain to open lines of communication to Nazi interests. But Dulles was not the only master chess player involved in this high-stakes game. FDR apparently had his own reason for allowing Dulles to establish himself in Bern. “He was a dangle,” said John Loftus, a former Nazi war crimes investigator for the U.S. Justice Department. “The White House wanted Dulles in clear contact with his Nazi clients so they could be easily identified.”
One of Dulles’s most important contacts in Europe was Thomas McKittrick, an old Wall Street friend who was president of the Bank for International Settlements. BIS had been created by the world’s leading central banks to administer German reparations payments after World War I, but it soon took on a life of its own, transforming itself into a pillar of the emerging global financial system. Lodged in a former hotel next to a chocolate shop in Basel, Switzerland, BIS was so secretive that nobody was permitted to peer inside its boardroom, even when it was empty. By 1940, when McKittrick arrived in Switzerland to oversee the bank, it was effectively controlled by Hitler’s regime. Five of its directors would later be charged with war crimes, including Hermann Schmitz, the CEO of IG Farben, the chemical conglomerate that became notorious for its production of Zyklon B, the gas used in Hitler’s death camps, and for its extensive use of slave labor during the war.
Schmitz was one of the many Dulles brothers’ law clients and business associates who were involved with BIS. It was a close-knit circle of men whose relationships smoothly weathered the storms of war. Even as his company was stockpiling poison for Hitler’s exterminators, Schmitz would send cheery Christmas and birthday greetings to his American business friends.
The secretive BIS became a crucial financial partner for the Nazis. Emil Puhl—vice president of Hitler’s Reichsbank and a close associate of McKittrick—once called BIS the Reichsbank’s only “foreign branch.” BIS laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi gold looted from the treasuries of occupied countries. Some of the gold was torn from the mouths of concentration camp victims or melted down from Jewish families’ candleholders, cigarette cases, and other personal belongings.
Dulles connected with McKittrick as soon as he set foot in Europe, meeting with the BIS president in Lisbon, even before he reached Switzerland. McKittrick, a well-tailored, pink-cheeked man with a high-domed forehead and prematurely snowy hair, later described the meeting as a happy coincidence. But both men were clearly eager to talk business. As soon as he walked into the lobby of his Lisbon hotel, the banker recalled, “Somebody grabbed me from behind and said, ‘Is that you Tom McKittrick? Well, my gosh, I’ve got to see you. You’re the first man I wanted to see in Switzerland.’ And it was Allen Dulles, on his way over [to his OSS station in Bern].” The two men stayed up all night at the hotel, in deep conversation, until McKittrick had to leave for his five o’clock plane.
Dulles was eager to pump McKittrick for inside information about the Reich, since the banker had good connections in Berlin. But the two men also wanted to discuss another issue that was of paramount concern to both of them: how to protect the assets of their German and American corporate clients in the tumultuous war climate.
Like Dulles, McKittrick was not popular with Roosevelt and his inner circle. FDR’s Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., developed a deep loathing for McKittrick, whom Morgenthau’s aide, Harry Dexter White, called “an American [bank] president doing business with the Germans while our American boys are fighting the Germans.” The Roosevelt administration moved to block BIS funds in the United States, but McKittrick hired Foster Dulles as legal counsel, who successfully intervened on the bank’s behalf.
Morgenthau was outraged when McKittrick made a business trip to the United States in winter 1942 and was warmly feted by Wall Street. Dozens of powerful financiers and industrialists—including the executives of several corporations, such as General Motors and Standard Oil, that had profited handsomely from doing business with the Nazis—gathered for a banquet in McKittrick’s honor at New York’s University Club on December 17.
Morgenthau tried to prevent McKittrick from returning to BIS headquarters in Switzerland on the grounds that the bank was clearly aiding the Nazi war effort. The banker later sniffed about the “nasty crew in the Treasury at the time. . . . I was very suspect because I talked to Italians and talked to Germans—and I said that they had behaved very well. I [refused to denounce them as] villains of the worst sort.” Allen Dulles came to McKittrick’s rescue, deftly pulling strings on the banker’s behalf, and in April 1943 he finally boarded a transatlantic flight to Europe.
Dulles and McKittrick continued to work closely together for the rest of the war. In the final months of the conflict, the two men collaborated against a Roosevelt operation called Project Safehaven that sought to track down and confiscate Nazi assets that were stashed in neutral countries. Administration officials feared that, by hiding their ill-gotten wealth, members of the German elite planned to bide their time after the war and would then try to regain power. Morgenthau’s Treasury Department team, which spearheaded Project Safehaven, reached out to the OSS and BIS for assistance. But Dulles and McKittrick were more inclined to protect their clients’ interests. Moreover, like many in the upper echelons of U.S. finance and national security, Dulles believed that a good number of these powerful German figures should be returned to postwar power, to ensure that Germany would be a strong bulwark against the Soviet Union. And during the Cold War, he would be more intent on using Nazi loot to finance covert anti-Soviet operations than on returning it to the families of Hitler’s victims.
Dulles realized that none of his arguments against Project Safehaven would be well received by Morgenthau. So he resorted to time-honored methods of bureaucratic stalling and sabotage to help sink the operation, explaining in a December 1944 memo to his OSS superiors that his Bern office lacked “adequate personnel to do [an] effective job in this field and meet other demands.”
McKittrick demonstrated equal disdain for the project, and his lack of cooperation proved particularly damaging to the operation, since BIS was the main conduit for the passage of Nazi gold. “The Treasury [Department] kept sending sleuth hounds over to Switzerland,” he complained years later. “The only thing they were interested in was where was Hitler putting his money, and where [Hermann] Goering was putting his money, and [Heinrich] Himmler, and all the rest of the big boys in Germany. But I, myself, am convinced that those fellows were not piling up money for the future.”
While Allen Dulles was using his OSS post in Switzerland to protect the interests of Sullivan and Cromwell’s German clients, his brother Foster was doing the same in New York. By playing an intricate corporate shell game, Foster was able to hide the U.S. assets of major German cartels like IG Farben and Merck KGaA, the chemical and pharmaceutical giant, and protect these subsidiaries from being confiscated by the federal government as alien property. Some of Foster’s legal origami allowed the Nazi regime to create bottlenecks in the production of essential war materials—such as diesel-fuel injection motors that the U.S. military needed for trucks, submarines, and airplanes. By the end of the war, many of Foster’s clients were under investigation by the Justice Department’s antitrust division. And Foster himself was under scrutiny for collaboration with the enemy.
But Foster’s brother was guarding his back. From his frontline position in Europe, Allen was well placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations that threatened the two brothers and their law firm. “Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favorite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany,” observed Nazi hunter John Loftus, who pored through numerous war documents related to the Dulles brothers when he served as a U.S. prosecutor in the Justice Department under President Jimmy Carter.
If their powerful enemy in the White House had survived the war, the Dulles brothers would likely have faced serious criminal charges for their wartime activities. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who as a young lawyer served with Allen in the OSS, later declared that both Dulleses were guilty of treason.
But with Franklin Roosevelt gone from the arena, as of April 1945, there was not enough political will to challenge two such imposing pillars of the American establishment. Allen was acutely aware that knowledge was power, and he would use his control of the country’s rapidly expanding postwar intelligence apparatus to carefully manage the flow of information about him and his brother.
FDR announced the Allied doctrine of “unconditional surrender” at the Casablanca Conference with British prime minister Winston Churchill in January 1943. The alliance’s third major leader, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, was unable to attend the conference because he was still contending with the horrific Nazi siege of Stalingrad. The Red Army would finally prevail at the Battle of Stalingrad, and the epic victory shifted the war’s momentum against the Third Reich. But the costs were monumental. The Soviet Union lost over one million soldiers during the struggle for Stalingrad—more than the United States would lose during the entire war.
The Casablanca Conference, held January 12–23, 1943, at a barbed wire–encircled hotel in Morocco, would sorely aggrieve the missing Russian leader by concluding that it was too soon to open a second major front in France. But Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender declaration, which took Churchill by surprise, was FDR’s way of reassuring Stalin that the Americans and British would not sell out the Soviet Union by cutting a separate peace deal with Nazi leaders.
The Casablanca Conference was a major turning point in the war, sealing the fate of Hitler and his inner circle. As Roosevelt told the American people in a radio address following the conference, by taking an uncompromising stand against the Third Reich, the Allies made clear that they would not allow Hitler’s regime to divide the antifascist alliance or to escape justice for its monumental crimes. “In our uncompromising policy,” said Roosevelt, “we mean no harm to the common people of the Axis nations. But we do mean to impose punishment and retribution in full upon their guilty, barbaric leaders.”
With his close ties to Germany’s upper echelons, Dulles considered the unconditional surrender declaration a “disaster” and was quick to let his Nazi contacts know what he thought about it. Shortly after the Casablanca Conference, Dulles sat down one wintry evening with an agent of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, an oily Mittel-European aristocrat who had flitted in and out of Dulles’s social circle for many years. Dulles received his guest, who was known as “the Nazi prince,” at 23 Herrengasse, treating him to good Scotch in a drawing room warmed by a fire. The Casablanca Declaration had clearly unnerved Himmler’s circle by making it clear that there would be no escape for the Reich’s “barbaric leaders.” But Dulles took pains to put his guest’s mind at rest. The Allies’ declaration, Dulles assured him, was “merely a piece of paper to be scrapped without further ado if Germany would sue for peace.”
Thus began Allen Dulles’s reign of treason as America’s top spy in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Maximilian Egon von Hohenlohe, the Nazi prince, was a creature of Europe’s war-ravaged landed aristocracy. Prince Max and his wife, a Basque marquesa, had once presided over an empire of properties stretching from Bohemia to Mexico. But two world wars and global economic collapse had stripped Hohenlohe of his holdings and reduced him to playing the role of Nazi courier. The prince had first met Dulles in Vienna in 1916, when they were both young men trying to make a name for themselves in diplomatic circles. During the 1930s, after he fell into the less refined company of the SS thugs who had taken over Germany, Hohenlohe popped up as an occasional guest of Allen and Clover in New York.
Hohenlohe was just one more member of the titled set who saw advantages to Hitler’s rise, and was quite willing to overlook its unpleasant side, which the prince explained away as rank-and-file Nazi Party excesses that would inevitably be sorted out. The Hohenlohe family was filled with ardent Nazi admirers. Perhaps the most bizarre was Stephanie von Hohenlohe, who became known as “Hitler’s princess.” A Jew by birth, Stephanie found social position by marrying another Hohenlohe prince. In the years before the war, she became one of Hitler’s most tireless promoters, helping to bring British press magnate Lord Rothermere into the Nazi fold. Stephanie took Hitler’s handsome, square-jawed adjutant Fritz Wiedemann as a lover and laid big plans for their rise to the top of the Nazi hierarchy. But it was not to be. Jealous of her favored position with Hitler, SS rivals plotted against her, spreading stories about her Jewish origins. Her aunt died in a concentration camp, and Stephanie was forced to flee Germany.
But Prince Max suffered no such fall from grace. He roamed Europe, feeling out British and American diplomats on a possible deal that would sacrifice Hitler but salvage the Reich. Wherever he went, Hohenlohe got a brusque reception. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden warned against even speaking with the prince: “If news of such a meeting became public . . . the damage would far exceed the value of anything the prince could possibly say.” American diplomats in Madrid, who were also approached by Hohenlohe, dismissed him as a “flagrant” liar and a “totally unscrupulous” schemer whose overriding concern was “to protect his considerable fortune.”
Dulles brushed aside these concerns; he had no compunctions about meeting with his old friend. The truth is, he felt perfectly at ease in the company of such people. Before the war, Dulles had been an occasional guest of Lord and Lady Astor at Cliveden, the posh couple’s country home along the Thames that became notorious as a weekend retreat for the pro-Nazi aristocracy. (There is no getting around this unwelcome fact: Hitler was much more fashionable in the social settings that men like Dulles frequented—in England as well as the United States—than it was later comfortable to admit.)
Royall Tyler, the go-between who set up the Bern reunion between Dulles and Hohenlohe, was cut from similar cloth. Born into Boston wealth, Tyler traipsed around Europe for most of his life, collecting Byzantine art, marrying a Florentine contessa, and playing the market. The multilingual Tyler and his titled wife led a richly cultured life, with Tyler haunting antique shops and private collections in search of Byzantine treasures and restoring a château in Burgundy where he showed off his rare books and art. “Traveling with Tyler,” noted London OSS chief David Bruce, “is like taking a witty, urbane, human Baedeker as a courier.” The contessa, who was equally sophisticated, moved in artistic and literary circles. She was at the bedside of Edith Wharton in 1937 when the novelist expired at her villa outside Paris.
Tyler was another one of those refined men who glided smoothly across borders and did not think twice about doing business with Nazi luminaries. During the war, he moved to Geneva to dabble in banking for the Bank for International Settlements. Tyler’s virulent anti-Semitism made him a congenial colleague when the Reich had business to conduct in Switzerland. Well connected in the enemy camp, Tyler was among the first people whom Dulles sought out after arriving in Switzerland.
Now Dulles and Hohenlohe, and their mutual friend Royall Tyler, were gathered amiably around the OSS man’s fireplace at 23 Herrengasse. Dulles broke the ice by recalling old times with Prince Max in Vienna and New York. Then the men quickly got down to business—trying to determine whether a realpolitik deal could be struck between Germany and the United States that would take Hitler out of the equation but leave the Reich largely intact. As they spun out their visions for a postwar Europe, there was much common ground. Dulles and Hohenlohe clearly saw the Soviet Union as the enemy, with a strong Germany as a bastion against the Bolshevik and Slavic menace. The two old friends also agreed that there was probably no room for the Jewish people in postwar Europe, and certainly they should not return to positions of power. Dulles offered that there were some in America who felt the Jews should be resettled in Africa—an old dream of Hitler’s: the Führer had once fantasized about sending the pariah population to Madagascar.
The two men were too worldly to engage in any emotional discussion about the Holocaust. Dulles put the prince at ease by telling him that he “was fed up with hearing from all the outdated politicians, emigrants and prejudiced Jews.” He firmly believed that “a peace had to be made in Europe in which all of the parties would be interested—we cannot allow it to be a peace based on a policy of winners and losers.”
Instead of Roosevelt’s “unconditional surrender,” in which the Nazi leadership would be held accountable for their crimes against humanity, Dulles was proposing a kind of no-fault surrender. It was a stunningly cynical and insubordinate gambit. The pact that Dulles envisioned not only dismissed the genocide against the Jews as an irrelevant issue, it also rejected the president’s firmly stated policy against secret deal making with the enemy. The man in the White House, clinging to his anti-Nazi principles, was clearly one of those “outdated politicians” in Dulles’s mind. While boldly undermining his president, Dulles had the nerve to assure Hohenlohe that he had FDR’s “complete support.”
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Even if Himmler had made it to Switzerland, however, he would not have found sanctuary. He was too prominent a face of Nazi horror for even Dulles to salvage. But the American spy would come to the rescue of many other Nazi outlaws from justice. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 1 The Double Agent
Neither Allen, Foster, nor their three sisters were ever as devout as their father, the Reverend Allen Macy Dulles, who presided over a small Presbyterian flock in Watertown, New York, a sleepy retreat favored by New York millionaires near Lake Ontario. But the siblings always regarded the family’s summer vacations on nearby Henderson Harbor as some kind of heaven. The huge lake and its sprinkling of islands held countless adventures for the children. The boys would rise early in the morning and, in the company of a lean, laconic fishing guide, set off in a skiff, stalking the waters for the lake’s delicious smallmouth black bass. At noon, they would ground their little sailboat on one of the islands and cook their catch over a driftwood fire. The fish was fried in crackling pork fat, served with corn and potatoes, and washed down with black coffee. Years later, they would recall these summer feasts as among the best meals of their lives.
Reverend Dulles was not a man of means, and he had difficulty supporting his family on his modest churchman’s salary. His illustrious father-in-law, the luxuriantly bewhiskered John Watson Foster, who had served briefly as secretary of state under President Benjamin Harrison and then established himself as one of Washington’s first power attorneys, was a beneficent presence in the family’s life. Reverend Dulles sometimes resented his dependence on the old man’s generosity. But the whole family thrived during their summer idylls on Lake Ontario, cozily squeezed into a big, red, clapboard cottage that had been built by Grandfather Foster. Their lakeside life was rustic—the house had no electricity and they had to pump their water. But it all seemed enchanted to the children.
There were picnics and moonlight sails, and on the Fourth of July the children would put small candles in paper balloons and set them floating in the air, watching as the golden lanterns drifted over the glittering water toward Canada. In the early evenings, Eleanor—the next oldest sibling after Allen—liked to sit on the family’s dock and watch the clouds gather over the lake, casting red and pink shafts on the darkening water. “I never feared hell and I thought heaven would be like Henderson but more so,” she mused in her later years.
Eleanor was exceedingly bright and curious, and she refused to resign herself to the prim, petticoat world to which girls of her generation were supposed to confine themselves. When the boys and men would go fishing, she would sometimes plunk herself down in the middle of the boat. When robed Chinese dignitaries and other exotic figures from her grandfather’s diplomatic forays would pay visits to Henderson Harbor, she would be certain to listen in on their conversations. Eleanor’s intelligence and determination would take her far, as she followed her brothers into the diplomatic corps, where she would eventually take over the State Department’s German desk during the critical years after World War II. But, as a brainy woman in a thoroughly male arena, she was always something of an outsider. Even her brothers were often perplexed about how to handle her. With her dark, wiry hair and thick eyeglasses, she considered herself the ugly duckling in the family. Her slightly askew status in the Dulles constellation seemed to heighten her powers of observation, however. Eleanor often had the keenest eye when it came to sizing up her family, especially her two brothers.
Allen loomed large in her life. She attached herself to him at an early age, but she learned to be wary of his sudden, explosive mood shifts. Most people saw only Allen’s charm and conviviality, but Eleanor was sometimes the target of his inexplicable eruptions of fury. Her infractions were often minor. Once Allen flew into a rage over how closely she parked the car to the family house. His moods were like the dark clouds that billowed without warning over Lake Ontario. Later in life, Eleanor simply took herself “out of his orbit to avoid the stress and furor that he stirred in me.”
Allen was darker and more complex than his older brother, and his behavior sometimes mystified his sister. One summer incident during their childhood would stick with Eleanor for the rest of her life. Allen, who was nearly ten at the time, and Eleanor, who was two years younger, had been given the task of minding their five-year-old sister Nataline. With her blond curls and sweet demeanor, Nataline—the baby in the family—was usually the object of everyone’s attention. But that day, the older children got distracted as they skipped stones across the lake’s surface from the family’s wooden dock. Suddenly, Nataline, who had retrieved a large rock to join in the game, went tumbling into the water, pulled down by the dead weight of her burden. As the child began floating away toward the lake’s deep, cold waters, her pink dress buoying her like an air balloon, Eleanor began screaming frantically. But Allen, who by then was a strong swimmer, was strangely impassive. The boy just stood on the dock and watched as his little sister drifted away. Finally, as if prompted by Eleanor’s cries, he, too, began yelling. Drawn by the uproar, their mother—who was recovering in bed from one of her periodic, pounding migraines—came flying down the dock and, plunging into the water, rescued little Nataline.
Throughout his life, Allen Dulles was slow to feel the distress of others. As a father, his daughter Joan would recall, Dulles seemed to regard his children with a curious remoteness, as if they were visitors in his house. Even his son and namesake Allen Jr. made little impact on him when he excelled in prep school and at Oxford, or later, in the Korean War, when the young man was struck in the head by a mortar shell fragment and suffered brain damage. Clover Dulles called her cold and driven husband “The Shark.”
Allen did not take after his father. Reverend Dulles, a product of Princeton University and Germany’s Göttingen University, was a scholarly, meditative type. While his children explored the wilds of Lake Ontario, he was likely to be sequestered in his upstairs study with his Sunday sermon. The minister was a compassionate man. While walking home one frigid day, he took off his coat and gave it to a man shivering in the street. On another occasion, he risked expulsion from the Presbyterian Church for performing a marriage for a divorced woman.
It was her mother, Eleanor would recall, who ran the family. Edith Foster Dulles was “a doer,” the kind of woman who “believed in action.” Eleanor would remember her cracking the whip on her father. “Now, Allen,” she would tell her husband, “you’ve been working on that book for five or six years. Don’t you think it’s good enough? Let’s publish it.”
The reflective pastor was less of an influence on his sons than their mother and grandfather. The Dulles boys were drawn to the men of action who called on Grandfather Foster, men who talked about war and high-stakes diplomacy, men who got things done. Foster and Allen both lacked their father’s sensitive temperament. Like Allen, Foster felt little empathy for those who were weak or vulnerable. He understood that there was misfortune in the world, but he expected people to put their own houses in order.
Foster’s callousness came into stark relief during the Nazi crisis in Germany. In 1932, as Hitler began his takeover of the German government, Foster visited three Jewish friends, all prominent bankers, in their Berlin office. The men were in a state of extreme anxiety during the meeting. At one point, the bankers—too afraid to speak—made motions to indicate a truck parked outside and suggested that it was monitoring their conversation. “They indicated to him that they felt absolutely no freedom,” Eleanor recalled.
Foster’s reaction to his friends’ terrible dilemma unnerved his sister. “There’s nothing that a person like me can do in dealing with these men, except probably to keep away from them,” he later told Eleanor. “They’re safer, if I keep away from them.” Actually, there was much that a Wall Street power broker like John Foster Dulles could have done for his endangered friends, starting with pulling strings to get their families and at least some of their assets out of Germany before it was too late.
Throughout her life, Eleanor wrestled with her brothers’ cold, if not cruel, behavior. A family loyalist to the end, she generally tried to give her brothers the most charitable interpretation possible. But sometimes the brothers strained even her sisterly charity. The same year that Foster sidestepped the urgent concerns of his Jewish friends in Berlin, Eleanor informed him that she intended to marry David Blondheim, the man she had been in love with ever since meeting him in Paris in 1925. Blondheim was a balding, middle-aged linguistics professor at Johns Hopkins University—with “a very sensitive mouth,” in Eleanor’s estimation, “and clear, brown eyes.” He was also a Jew. Eleanor’s parents had given Blondheim their approval, calling him “charming,” after meeting him and Eleanor for dinner during a visit to Paris. But by 1932, Reverend Dulles was dead and Foster was head of the family. And he had a different perspective on the mixed marriage that his sister and her fiancé finally felt brave enough to attempt.
Foster wrote Eleanor a letter, asking her if she realized “the complications of marrying a Jew”—and helpfully pointing out a dozen such problems. Her brother’s letter stunned and infuriated Eleanor, who by then was in her midthirties and not in need of her brother’s counsel in such matters. She promptly replied, but, not wanting to directly defy her imposing brother, she sent the letter to his wife, Janet. In her letter, Eleanor made it clear that Foster need not trouble himself with her life’s “complications” and that, in the future, she would simply “go my own way.”
Years later, Eleanor tried to explain away her brother’s behavior. He was not motivated by anti-Semitism, she insisted. He was just a product of his social and professional milieu. In his circles, she explained, people would say, “We can’t have too many Jews in this club” or “We can’t have too many Jews in this firm.” Foster simply saw this attitude as a fact of life, Eleanor observed—“just like the climate.”
In 1934, the fragile Blondheim, distressed by the growing cataclysm in Europe and private demons, sunk into depression and killed himself, sticking his head into the kitchen oven. Reasserting himself as paterfamilias, Foster swept back into the deeply shaken life of his sister and took charge. The suicide must, of course, be hushed up. And Eleanor must instantly shed the dead man’s name, or she would be haunted by it in years to come. Eleanor dutifully complied with Foster’s direction and the name Blondheim was purged from the Dulles family record, as if the brilliant man with the sensitive mouth and clear, brown eyes had never existed. The fact she was about to give birth to Blondheim’s son was a bond that Foster could never make disappear.
In early June 1939, the German transatlantic ocean liner St. Louis cruised slowly up the coastline of Florida. The ship, carrying more than nine hundred Jewish refugees from Europe, had been turned away from its original destination, Havana, after days of increasingly frantic negotiations with the Cuban government. Now the black-and-white ocean liner, towering eight decks high and flying a swastika flag, had become a ghost ship, with dimming hopes of finding a safe harbor. While the ship was anchored in Havana Harbor, relatives of the St. Louis passengers crowded onto motorboats and circled the ocean liner, desperately crying out to their loved ones. As the tension-filled days went by, one passenger grew more and more agitated, convinced that he was about to be seized by Gestapo agents on board and bundled off to a concentration camp. He slashed his wrists and jumped into the harbor, where he was rescued and sent to a hospital. He was one of the few allowed to stay in Cuba.
As St. Louis captain Gustav Schroeder guided his ship along the Florida shore, his passengers could see the sparkling lights of Miami in the near distance. Schroeder had ordered his German crew to treat the refugees just like any other passengers. While the ocean liner had steamed across the Atlantic from Hamburg, the captain asked his stewards to serve ice cream to the children and to play movies in the evening. But after the ship was turned away from Havana—where Nazi agents had stirred up anti-Semitic feelings among the local population and demagogues had fanned fears that the Jews would steal jobs that were ever scarcer in the declining economy—the festive mood on board the St. Louis had quickly dissipated. Now Captain Schroeder hugged the U.S. coastline in the dim hope that the Roosevelt administration would come to his passengers’ rescue.
The doomed voyage of the St. Louis would become a symbol of the Jewish people’s terrible predicament. While the ship plowed the seas with its human cargo, the governments of the world—from Washington, D.C., to London to Buenos Aires—debated its fate. In Washington, FDR’s Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., maneuvered strenuously to win permission for the ship to dock in an American port. Morgenthau, who had established himself as the conscience of the administration on the Jewish refugee crisis, dispatched U.S. Coast Guard ships to follow the St. Louis as it journeyed north along the Eastern Seaboard, so he could keep track of the ghost vessel in case the government allowed it to land.
Morgenthau was so integral a member of Roosevelt’s inner circle that he was known as “the assistant president.” He was of German Jewish ancestry and Democratic Party royalty. His father, New York real estate mogul Henry Morgenthau Sr., had been one of President Woodrow Wilson’s major financial backers and served as Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Henry Jr., who ran a Hudson Valley farm near the Roosevelt family’s Hyde Park estate, would develop a long personal and political relationship with FDR. When Franklin’s privileged life was suddenly turned upside down by the ravages of polio, Morgenthau was one of the few political advisers who remained close to him, keeping his spirits up with games of Parcheesi.
After he was elected to the White House in 1932, Roosevelt—who was the first presidential candidate to campaign against anti-Semitism—appointed Morgenthau and several other Jews to prominent positions in his administration. Fifteen percent of FDR’s top appointees were Jewish, at a time when Jews represented less than 3 percent of the population. Bigoted enemies of the New Deal enjoyed a ditty about Franklin and First Lady Eleanor—who was known as a champion of African American civil rights—that went, “You kiss the niggers / and I’ll kiss the Jews / and we’ll stay in the White House / as long as we choose.” There were even rumors that Roosevelt himself was Jewish.
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Perhaps not surprisingly, then, when young Allen Dulles was serving in the U.S. embassy in Turkey, his first overseas posting after World War I, he fell for the most notorious anti-Jewish fabrication in history. One day the young American diplomat was given a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by a British reporter who had fished the scurrilous document out of a secondhand bookstore in Istanbul’s old European quarter. The Protocols purported to offer a secret plan for Jewish world domination, and included tales about Christian children being sacrificed for Passover feast rituals and other lurid fantasies. By the time Dulles got his hands on the book, which was the creation of the Russian czar’s anti-Semitic secret police, the document had been widely denounced and discredited. But Dulles took it seriously enough to send a coded report about the secret Jewish “plot” back to his superiors in Washington.
Atavistic ideas about exotic Jewish “outsiders” were still widely prevalent in the State Department in June 1939 as the St. Louis lingered along the Eastern Seaboard, its food and water supplies running low. In the end, the Long faction in the Roosevelt administration would prevail in the debate over the ship. Captain Schroeder was forced to turn his ocean liner around and return to Europe, docking in Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17 after a month at sea, and disgorging the men, women, and children on board to their fates. Less than three months later, Hitler invaded Poland, and Europe went to war. More than 250 of the St. Louis’s passengers would be swallowed by the Holocaust.
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On July 17, 1942, Heinrich Himmler’s luxurious private train—equipped with a dining room, shower, and even a screening room—pulled into Auschwitz, a backwater town in the swampy flatlands of southern Poland. Word quickly spread about the Reichsführer’s unusual visit, soon reaching Eduard Schulte, the chief executive of a major German mining company with property in the area. What had brought Himmler to this forlorn destination? Schulte reckoned that it must have something to do with the rapidly expanding prison camp outside town, where IG Farben had built a factory to utilize the camp’s slave labor.
It is not widely recognized that the Nazi reign of terror was, in a fundamental way, a lucrative racket—an extensive criminal enterprise set up to loot the wealth of Jewish victims and exploit their labor. The chemical giant Farben was at the forefront of integrating concentration camp labor into its industrial production process, with other major German corporations like Volkswagen, Siemens, and Krupp following closely behind. Himmler’s SS empire moved aggressively to cut itself in on the spoils, extracting sizable payments from these companies for providing them with a steady flow of forced labor. Schulte, who was afraid that the rapidly expanding Auschwitz complex would begin to intrude on his own company’s mining properties, immediately took a wary interest in Himmler’s visit.
Schulte himself was not a Nazi, but he had good contacts in those circles. His deputy at the mining firm belonged to the Nazi Party and, in fact, knew Himmler. To ingratiate themselves with the party, the firm’s board of directors had loaned the local Nazi chief a company-owned villa that was located in a nearby forest. It was here that Himmler and his entourage were to be entertained that evening.
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In the final months of the war, as the United States and Britain finally opened a second front in the war, and Hitler’s forces were caught in an inexorable vise between the Red Army in the east and the Anglo-American military machine in the west, Roosevelt and close advisers like Morgenthau began contemplating the Nazi regime’s postwar fate. The glory that was European civilization had gone up in “human smoke,” in Nicholson Baker’s words. But FDR was determined to keep the vow that he made repeatedly throughout the war. He would bring to justice the perpetrators of this unprecedented degradation of life. The Third Reich would be put on trial and its reign ground to dust.
Once again, however, Allen Dulles and his allies had other plans. (David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 2 Human Smoke
Nuremberg, which enshrined the legal principle of personal responsibility for one’s actions, even in war, was a showcase of Nazi denial. When Hitler’s wily foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was asked by an interrogator whether he was aware that millions had been murdered in the Nazi death camps, he had the gall to exclaim, “That . . . is an astounding thing to me . . . I can’t imagine that!” It was as if he were suddenly waking from the bad dream of his own life. The defendants had long before abdicated all of their will to the Führer. As defendant Wilhelm Frick, the Reich’s minister of the interior, declared in 1935, “I have no conscience; Adolf Hitler is my conscience.”
The most egotistical defendants, like Goering and Schacht, struck defiant poses. At times, Reichsmarschall Goering mugged for the courtroom, laughing at the prosecutors’ mispronunciation of German names and puffing his cheeks indignantly when they made errors about the Nazi chain of command.
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President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill were so intent on meting out a fitting punishment that they originally favored taking the law into their own hands and summarily shooting Hitler’s top military, ministerial, and party ranks—Churchill estimated the number would be somewhere between fifty and a hundred men. The prime minister thought that once the proper identifications were made, the killing could be completed within six hours. In one of history’s deeper ironies, it was Joseph Stalin who insisted that the Nazi leaders be put on trial, lecturing his Western allies on the merits of due process. “U[ncle]. J[oe]. took an unexpectedly ultra-respectable line,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt after meeting with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944. The Soviet premier told Churchill that “there must be no executions without trial; otherwise the world would say we were afraid to try them.”
Roosevelt finally came around to the idea of an international war crimes tribunal. But once again he had to face stiff opposition from within his own State Department. Future foreign service legend George Kennan, who was a junior diplomat in the U.S. embassy in Berlin when war broke out, was one of those who took a strong stand against punishing Nazi war criminals. Purging these leaders from German society would not only be greatly unpopular with the German people, Kennan argued, it would be hugely disruptive. “We would not find any other class of people competent to assume the burdens [of leading postwar Germany],” he insisted. “Whether we like it or not, nine-tenths of what is strong, able and respected in Germany” carried the taint of Nazism.
It was not until late 1943 that a small, underfunded international commission began the urgent work of trying to define the barbaric new crimes emerging from World War II and compiling a list of war criminals for prosecution as soon as peace permitted. FDR appointed an old friend named Herbert Pell as the U.S. representative to the United Nations War Crimes Commission. (The United Nations was yet to be founded, but this is how the Allies sometimes referred to themselves during the war.) Pell, a fellow New York Brahmin and ardent New Deal supporter, quickly found himself in a political vortex, besieged by State Department bureaucrats who did not consider an international tribunal necessary and were determined to sabotage Pell’s efforts.
At six feet five inches and 250 pounds, Pell was a towering man—and, raised in the rarefied societies of Tuxedo Park and Newport Beach, he had more than enough self-confidence to hold his own among his Washington foes. The Pells had inherited a tobacco fortune, their forefathers had been granted the land that would become the Bronx and Westchester County by the British crown, and there was no need for “Bertie” Pell to do a thing with his life if he had so chosen. Indeed, with his waxed mustache and pince-nez glasses, he seemed like a throwback to the Gilded Age. But inspired by the rambunctious reformism of Teddy Roosevelt, Pell leaped into the grubby fray of American politics, albeit in Manhattan’s silk stocking district on the Upper East Side, which, despite its long aversion to Democrats, briefly elected him to Congress. By the time his old Harvard classmate Franklin Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, Bertie Pell was a full-on renegade from his class, which he dismissed as a sybaritic and selfish lot whose “piglike rush for immediate profits” had brought ruin to the country in the crash of 1929.
Those who snubbed him at the clubhouse in Tuxedo Park—a rolling estate of woods, lakes, and citadels for America’s gentry located in Orange County, New York, some forty miles outside of New York City—were too stupid, in Pell’s not-so-humble opinion, to realize that Franklin Roosevelt was trying to save their bacon from a revolution that was rumbling right outside their gates. “I am almost the last capitalist who is willing to be saved by you,” Pell wrote Roosevelt in 1936 in a letter beseeching the president to draft him for the New Deal cause. The following year, Pell wrote again, praising FDR’s accomplishments: “Your administration has made possible the continuance of American institutions for at least fifty years. You have done for the government what St. Francis did for the Catholic Church. You have brought it back to the people.”
Roosevelt finally did put Pell to work, sending him to Portugal and then to Hungary as U.S. ambassador in the late 1930s, from where he watched with growing alarm the rise of fascism. By the time Pell was chosen for the war crimes commission in June 1943, he knew the full depths of the evil that had taken hold of Europe. He was eager to get to London, where other commission members were already beginning to meet, but Pell found himself ensnared by State Department bureaucracy. His principal nemesis was the State Department legal adviser, a fussy and officious man named Green Hackworth.
The two men clashed immediately, on a personal as well as political level. “Hackworth was well named,” Pell recalled later. “He was a little, legal hack of no particular attainments. He was manifestly not born a gentleman and had acquired very few of the ideas of a gentleman on his way up in the world. His manners were bad, his fingers were dirty [and] he was clearly unused to good society.”
More important, Pell’s mission abroad was strongly opposed by Hackworth, who took a narrowly legalistic approach to the war crimes question. War was not subject to a moral calculus, in the eyes of State Department officials like Hackworth, who rejected the very idea that the international community might hold heads of state responsible for atrocities against their own people. This traditional view was rendered obsolete by the Nazi inferno in Europe, but men like Hackworth seemed oblivious to the new world around them.
Pell, in contrast, was intent on bringing to justice not just Nazi Party high officials, but also the German business elite who had profited from Hitler’s rule and even the rank-and-file Gestapo men who, unless they were severely punished, Pell feared, would go home to their villages and brag about what they had gotten away with. “The first thing is to make clear to every last German in the world that war is not a profitable business,” Pell wrote to Secretary of State Hull in 1943. Pell’s zeal for justice—and his broad definition of German guilt—sent alarms through the U.S. Foreign Service and Wall Street circles, where the primary concerns were related to postwar German stability.
Green Hackworth and his colleagues successfully conspired to hold up Pell’s departure for months. Finally, after FDR intervened on his behalf with Hull, Pell was able to set sail for London on the Queen Mary in December 1943—a full six months after his appointment to the war crimes commission. Pell arrived in a frigidly cold, war-torn London, where heating fuel was in short supply. Fortunately, he had sent word ahead to his English tailor, who was able to supply him with woolen long underwear that fit his large frame.
Pell was shocked by London’s widespread war damage: every block seemed to have at least one demolished building. Three of the friends in his small London social circle were killed by German bombs. One was blown up, along with the rest of the congregation, while attending Sunday church. Only the minister survived. Pell toughed it out during air raids, staying aboveground instead of descending into the crowded, badly ventilated shelters. At age fifty-nine, he thought he was more likely to die from catching the flu than by being blown up by a German bomb or a Doodlebug, as the British called the V–1 flying bombs whistling overhead. When the Luftwaffe bombers roared over London, they dropped huge flares to illuminate their targets, and the city was cast in a spectral glow just before the explosions began. As the president’s man in London, Pell thought it was important to carry on with his life in the same plucky manner as the Brits. One afternoon, he took a visiting cousin for tea at the exclusive Athenaeum Club. Although every one of the club’s windows had been blasted out, the waiters still made their rounds with the same crisp and aloof manner as they had before the war.
As the war crimes commission went about its work through 1944, Pell, despite his lack of legal experience, took a leadership role, developing prosecutorial guidelines for the postwar tribunal that would try Germany’s war criminals. While some commission members were uncertain how to categorize the Nazi brutality against the Jews, Pell vehemently argued that this violence, even if conducted away from the battlefield, must be regarded as a prosecutable war crime, and the commission came to agree with him.
But Pell was unable to finish his work with the war crimes commission. In December 1944, he returned to America for the wedding of his only son—future U.S. senator Claiborne Pell—and to consult with the State Department. Once they had him back in Washington, his political enemies were determined to never let him return. Again, Pell appealed to his old friend in the White House to help him overpower the State Department hacks. But this time, Roosevelt’s health was failing and he could not muster the energy to rescue Bertie. On February 1, the State Department announced Pell’s dismissal.
In early April 1945, Henry Morgenthau went down to the presidential retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, where FDR was convalescing, to urge him to directly confront the State Department cabal that seemed hell-bent on appeasing the country’s German enemies and antagonizing its Soviet allies. Sitting down for cocktails with the president, Morgenthau was shaken by the president’s “very haggard” appearance. “His hands shook so that he started to knock the glasses over. . . . I found his memory bad and he was constantly confusing names.” After drinks and dinner, Roosevelt seemed to rally and he asked Morgenthau what he had in mind. The Treasury secretary told him it was time “to break the State Department” and replace the old guard with loyal New Dealers. FDR assured Morgenthau he was with him “100 percent.” The next afternoon, April 12, Roosevelt died after suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
That same day, Pell was scheduled to meet in Washington with the new secretary of state, Edward Stettinius Jr., to discuss being reinstated on the war crimes commission—a meeting that had been brokered by FDR. After he had been fired, Pell had fought on, working the Washington press and stirring up outrage over his treatment at the hands of the State Department. The public controversy put Pell’s enemies on the defensive. But in the wake of Roosevelt’s death, Pell was politically isolated, and by September 1945 he finally admitted defeat.
There were two reasons he was targeted for political destruction, Pell told a group of sympathetic lawyers who had rallied around him: “One is anti-Semitism, which is, to a large extent, prevalent in the State Department.” He also antagonized his powerful enemies, he explained, by going after “German industrialists whose plight arouses the class loyalties of their opposition numbers in Great Britain and the United States. We cannot forget [for example] that one of the big war factories in Germany was the Opel Company which was owned and financed by the General Motors Corporation, a company in which Secretary Stettinius had a great interest. The biggest electric company in Germany was owned and financed by the General Electric Company of New York. We have here very potent reasons why a large and important group in this country is trying to pipe down on the serious investigations of [corporate Germany’s collaboration with the Nazis].”
In the end, Pell would triumph. Because of the uproar in the press over his dismissal, the State Department was finally forced to recognize the inevitability of a war crimes trial. In a statement released in the midst of the Pell melee, the department acknowledged that President Roosevelt had repeatedly made clear his intention. As the first war crimes trial got under way in Nuremberg in November 1945, the spirit of FDR and the president’s justice warriors—men like Pell and Morgenthau—hovered over the legal forum.
But the political foes who had opposed Roosevelt’s day of reckoning for the Nazis did not fully surrender. They remained determined to control the proceedings at Nuremberg and to protect valued members of Hitler’s hierarchy.
In May 1945, Allen Dulles and OSS chief Bill Donovan met in Frankfurt with Supreme Court associate justice Robert Jackson, who had just been named chief U.S. war crimes prosecutor by the new president, Harry S. Truman. During their meeting, Dulles underlined the various ways that he could be of use as Jackson prepared his case, including providing German witnesses for the prosecution as well as secret enemy documents. Jackson was delighted by Dulles’s offer of assistance, noting in his diary that it was a “God send.” Donovan further reinforced the relationship with Jackson’s team by putting a number of OSS agents on his staff. But as the weeks went by, Jackson developed the sinking feeling that he had fallen into an OSS “trap.” It became clear to the Nuremberg prosecutor that Donovan and Dulles harbored ulterior motives and agendas that did not always mesh with the interests of justice at Nuremberg.
The tensions between Donovan and Jackson began to grow in July when the OSS chief moved to take over what Nuremberg prosecutors referred to as the trial’s “economic case.” As Wall Street lawyers, Donovan and Dulles considered themselves uniquely equipped to take charge of the case against the industrialists and bankers who had financed Hitler’s regime. But such a role would have given the two OSS men the ability to control the legal fates of German business figures who had strong ties to their own Wall Street circles—including infamous former clients of the Dulles brothers.
Robert Jackson was a strong New Dealer who had risen through FDR’s Justice Department, where he had taken on powerful corporate interests like the Mellon family and fought tax evasion and antitrust battles. Well aware of the corporate conflicts of interest that Donovan and Dulles brought to the Nuremberg case, Jackson stunned the OSS chief by informing him that he would not be leading the prosecution of Hitler’s financiers at Nuremberg.
Jackson quickly discovered that his concerns had been well founded. As the trial’s start date approached that fall, Donovan began communicating with Goering and Schacht, whom he recognized as the two most financially astute men among the accused. Goering had amassed huge economic power under Hitler’s regime, organizing state-run mining, steel, and weapons enterprises and taking control of heavy industries in the countries overrun by the Nazis. And Schacht, for his part, had remained a well-respected figure in New York, London, and Swiss banking circles even after selling his soul to Hitler. (Schacht later fell out with the Führer and spent the final days of the war in the VIP section of Dachau, where prisoners received relatively lenient treatment.) The banker knew where much of Nazi Germany’s assets were hidden, which continued to make him a valued man in global financial circles.
Behind the scenes, Donovan took the shameless step of working out a deal with these two prominent defendants, offering them leniency in return for their testimony against the other accused Hitler accomplices. When the OSS chief informed Jackson and his legal team that he had cut a tentative deal with Schacht and with—of all people—Goering, the prosecutors were aghast. Telford Taylor, Jackson’s assistant prosecutor, later called Donovan’s actions “ill conceived and dangerous . . . Goering was the surviving leader and symbol of Nazism. To put him forward as the man who could tell the truth about the Third Reich and lay bare the guilt of its leaders, as Donovan appeared to expect, was nothing short of ludicrous.”
On November 26, a few days after the trial began, Jackson wrote a letter to Donovan, making it clear that their views were “far apart” and there was no role for the OSS chief on the Nuremberg team. By the end of the month, Donovan was gone.
But Allen Dulles was a more subtle practitioner of the art of power than Wild Bill Donovan. He would continue to play a crafty role in the dispensation of justice—or its opposite—not only during the first trial but through the eleven subsequent Nuremberg trials, which stretched from 1946 to 1949. In all, some two hundred accused German war criminals were prosecuted at Nuremberg, and hundreds more would be tried in military and civilian courts over the following decades. But due to Dulles’s carefully calibrated interventions, a number of Europe’s most notorious war criminals—men who should have found themselves in the dock at Nuremberg, where they almost certainly would have been convicted of capital crimes—escaped justice. Some were helped to flee through “ratlines” to Franco’s Spain, the Middle East, South America, and even the United States. Others were eased into new lives of power and affluence in postwar West Germany, where they became essential confederates in Dulles’s rapidly growing intelligence complex.
In the film, Dr. Hans Mertens, a German surgeon who had served with the Wehrmacht, returns to Berlin after the war. The city is a monument to rubble; it seems to have been deconstructed stone by stone, brick by brick. Staudte needed no studio back lot or special effects. Demolished Berlin was his sound stage. Dr. Mertens, who wants to forget everything he has witnessed during the war, wanders drunk and obliterated through the city’s ruins. But his past won’t release him. He comes across his former commander, Captain Bruckner, a happily shallow man who, despite the atrocities he ordered during the war, has returned to a prosperous life in Berlin as a factory owner.
“Don’t look so sad,” Bruckner tells the doctor as the two men pick their way through the rubble one day in search of a hidden cabaret. “Every era offers its chances if you find them. Helmets from saucepans or saucepans from helmets. It’s the same game. You must manage—that’s all.”
Dr. Mertens’s bitterness deepens as he observes Berlin being profitably revived by the very men who destroyed it. One day, fortified by drink, he comes across a lively nest of vermin, scurrying about in the rubble. “Rats,” he says to himself. “Rats everywhere. The city is alive again.”
By the end of the film, Mertens has emerged from his drunken anesthesia and has begun to consider a path of action. How do you make a better world after a reign of terror like Hitler’s? Should he kill a man like Bruckner? Should he try to bring him to justice?
Murderers Among Us ends on a hopeful, if fanciful, note. Mertens imagines Bruckner behind bars—no longer looking smug, but stricken. “Why are you doing this to me?” he screams, as images of his victims float ghostlike around him.
When the movie was produced, the first Nuremberg trial was still under way, and it looked to the world as if justice would indeed prevail. But as the years went by, a surprising number of men like Bruckner not only escaped justice but thrived in the new Germany. Thanks to officials like Dulles, many Bruckners shimmied free from their cages. The rats were everywhere. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 3 Ghosts of Nuremberg
As the convoy crawled through the dark toward the lake, partisans opened fire on the cars. Scotti bravely jumped out of his vehicle and stood in the headlights, praying that the resistance soldiers would recognize him and stop shooting. Fortunately, one did. There was more gunfire and even a grenade attack as they continued their journey, but finally, the odd rescue team arrived at the Villa Locatelli. After talking their way past the partisans’ blockade as well as the SS guard, they entered the villa and found General Wolff in full SS uniform, as if he had been expecting them all along. He offered the rescue party some of the vintage Scotch he kept for special occasions, volunteering that the whiskey had been expropriated from the British by Rommel during the North African campaign.
It was after two in the morning when the caravan arrived safely back in Chiasso with their special passenger, who had changed into civilian clothes for the journey and was slumped low in the backseat of the middle car. Gaevernitz was anxiously awaiting the rescue team’s return in the dingy railroad station café. He had no intention of greeting Wolff in public. But when the SS general heard that Dulles’s aide was there, he bounded over to him and shook his hand. “I will never forget what you have done for me,” Wolff declared.
Dulles and Gaevernitz would learn that the SS man had a strange sense of gratitude. In the coming years, Wolff would become a millstone around their necks.
Later that morning, an exhausted Gaevernitz, who had not been out of his clothes all that night, took a train to his family’s lovely villa in Ascona, on Lake Maggiore, so he could enjoy a long sleep. At the railway station in Locarno, where he stopped for breakfast, he listened to the 7:00 a.m. radio broadcast, which was filled with news of Mussolini’s capture and other dramatic bulletins from the Lake Como area. Gaevernitz kept expecting to hear news of General Wolff’s rescue by a U.S.-led team of commandos; he was determined that his boss’s name must be kept out of the story.
“It would have made a lovely headline in the papers,” Gaevernitz later mused in his diary. “‘German S.S. General Rescued From Italian Patriots by American Consul’!!! Poor Allen!! I really felt I had to spare him this [embarrassment].”
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After he decided that Wolff was a dependable partner, Dulles went to great lengths to rehabilitate the SS commander’s image. In his reports back to OSS headquarters, he framed Wolff in the best possible light: he was a “moderate” and “probably the most dynamic [German] personality in North Italy.” Although some U.S. and British intelligence officials suspected that Wolff was serving as an agent of Hitler and Himmler and trying to drive a wedge between the Allies, Dulles insisted that the German general was acting heroically and selflessly to bring peace to Italy and to spare its land, people, and art treasures from a final, scorched-earth conflagration.
Dulles knew from the beginning that working with Wolff was an extremely risky proposition—not just because of the Allies’ strict prohibition against a separate peace deal but because Himmler’s right-hand man was certain to be placed high on the list of Nazi war criminals. Even many years later, when the evidence against Wolff had grown to utterly damning proportions, the old spy refused to pass judgment on him. “The conclusions [about Wolff] must be left to history,” wrote Dulles in his carefully calibrated Operation Sunrise memoir. He was delaying a judgment that, for many, had long since been obvious.
When Wolff was later confronted with the obscenity of the Nazi leadership’s war crimes, he would inevitably plead ignorance, claiming he occupied such a lofty perch in the Reich’s clouds that he did not learn about the death camps until the final days of the war. When this tactic failed, he would claim that he had been powerless to stop the mass slaughter, or he would fall back on legalisms and other technical evasions. But the stains on Wolff were not so easily erased.
Karl Wolff, who would go down in history as “one of the unknown giants of Hitler’s Reich,” was content to operate in the shadows. While little known by the public, however, he played a prominent administrative role in Hitler’s lethal assembly line. He was, asTime magazine later branded him, the “Bureaucrat of Death.”
The Nuremberg trials would firmly establish the principle that administrators of murder—not just the actual executioners—could be found guilty of war crimes. Although he was not a central cog in the daily operations of the Holocaust like Adolf Eichmann, Wolff, as Himmler’s top troubleshooter, frequently intervened to ensure the smooth efficiency of the extermination process.
During the Nuremberg trials, a highly incriminating letter written by Wolff would emerge that made it clear how important his intervention could be in keeping the trains rolling to the death camps. In July 1942, after the trains hauling Polish Jews to the Treblinka gas chambers were temporarily halted because of the German military’s demand for railcars, Wolff appealed to a Nazi transportation official for help. After the rail shortage was successfully resolved, Wolff sent off a heartfelt letter of thanks.
“I was especially pleased,” Wolff wrote the transportation minister in a chillingly bureaucratic note, “to receive the information that, for the last 14 days, a train has been leaving daily for Treblinka with 5,000 members of the chosen people, and that in this way we are in a position to carry out this population movement at an accelerated tempo.”
Wolff also played a key administrative role in a series of medical experiments on human subjects at the notorious Dachau camp from 1942 through 1943. The research was conducted by Luftwaffe doctors who were intent on increasing the survival rates of German pilots, and was strongly supported by Himmler, who fancied himself a man of science. In the first round of experiments, human guinea pigs culled by the SS from Dachau’s ranks of the damned were forced inside special low-oxygen chambers to determine how long Luftwaffe pilots could fly at high altitudes before passing out. Inside the chambers, victims gasped for air, frantically cried out, and finally collapsed. It was up to the Luftwaffe doctor in charge of the experiments, a sadist named Siegmund Rascher, whether the victims would be revived in time or allowed to die. Rascher oversaw about 150 such high-altitude experiments, of which at least half resulted in death.
A subsequent round of medical experiments at Dachau was aimed at finding the best ways to revive German aviators who were rescued after crashing into the frigid North Sea. Camp inmates were forced to stand naked in freezing weather for up to fourteen hours. Others were submerged in tanks of iced water for three hours at a time. The subjects of the initial freezing experiments all died. But then the doctors added a new twist to their experiments. They “rewarmed” their victim in a hot bath and then revived him further with “animal heat” provided by four female Gypsies. The victim, after being nearly frozen to death, suddenly found his naked body warmly embraced by four women who brought him back to life.
Wolff should have been sitting in the dock at Nuremberg as part of the first round of defendants. But it was the cruder and less-connected executioner Ernst Kaltenbrunner who would hang for the sins of the SS. Nor was Wolff in the dock the following year, when the Doctors’ Trial began, though he would be singled out by prosecutors as one of the principal “masterminds” behind the Dachau experiments. Throughout the Nuremberg proceedings and the legal challenges that confronted him in later years, Wolff was watched over by his twin guardian angels—Dulles and Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz. They made sure that the sword of justice never came down with its full might on SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. Among the few lives saved by the Operation Sunrise peace gambit, as it turned out, was that of Wolff himself and those of the SS officers who conspired with him.
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Determined to keep Wolff out of the defendants’ dock, however, Dulles went so far as to bury incriminating evidence, including one particularly damning OSS report that blamed the Nazi general not only for the “wholesale slaughter of populations” and “the collective reprisals” against Italian civilians, but also for the torture and murder of OSS agents in his Bolzano SS headquarters. The feelings against Wolff were running understandably high in some OSS quarters, where the SS general was suspected of personally interrogating American intelligence officers. But Dulles betrayed his own men, blocking the OSS report on Wolff from ever reaching the Nuremberg staff. Instead, it was Dulles’s portrait of Wolff as a “moderate” and a “gentleman” that was sent to the Nuremberg legal team, along with a recommendation that he not be prosecuted for SS crimes.
Dulles succeeded in keeping Wolff off the Nuremberg defendants list. The general would appear at the trial only as a witness, testifying on behalf of his fellow war criminal Hermann Goering. But as Nuremberg prosecutors prepared for new rounds of trials, and as war crimes tribunals were organized in Italy and other countries that had fallen under the boot of Nazi occupation, Wolff still found himself behind bars. Realizing that the SS general was still not safe from prosecution, Dulles arranged for Wolff to be diagnosed with a nervous disorder, and in spring 1946 he was transferred to a psychiatric institution in Augsburg, Austria.
Wolff knew that Dulles had engineered his psychiatric diagnosis to shield him from prosecution, but he also suspected that it was a way “to prevent me [from] talking.” The general knew that he continued to have great leverage over Dulles: if he revealed the immunity deal that the two men had worked out, the spymaster’s career would be jeopardized. Wolff was also privy to another Sunrise dirty secret: the extent to which the separate peace pact was a cold betrayal of the United States’ and Britain’s wartime Soviet allies. In fact, Dulles was so concerned about what Wolff might be telling his interrogators behind bars that he began to have his conversations secretly taped.
As Wolff’s imprisonment stretched on, he grew increasingly frustrated and began talking more freely about the “mutual understanding” that he and Dulles had struck and about the way he had been double-crossed. Wolff’s increasingly vocal behavior was not lost on Dulles and the other American and British authorities involved in the Sunrise deal. At one point, his jailers quietly offered him an open door to his freedom. But Wolff did not want the life of a rat on the run, hiding out in Argentina or Chile. He was determined to hold the Sunrise cabal to their deal; he wanted to be fully exonerated and allowed to regain a prominent position in the new Germany.
In February 1947, Wolff played his trump card, writing a letter to President Truman in which he boldly revealed the terms of the Operation Sunrise agreement. Wolff informed Truman that, in return for his cooperation on the secret surrender, “I received from Mr. Dulles and his secretary, Mr. Gaevernitz, an explicit promise” of freedom for himself and his fellow “meritorious” SS collaborators on the Sunrise deal. It was now time, Wolff informed Truman, for the United States to honor the bargain made by Dulles.
The German POW followed up his letter to Truman with an equally emphatic note to Dulles, in which he managed to strike a tone at once courtly and threatening. Wolff insisted that Dulles must come to his aid, and that of his “entire [Sunrise] squadron,” to win their “honorable release from captivity.” His direct appeal to Dulles, wrote Wolff, “is not only my right but my knightly duty”; by negotiating secretly with the U.S. spymaster, Wolff reminded him, he had “saved your honor and reputation . . . at the risk of our lives.”
Wolff stirred the pot further by sending a similar letter to Major General Lyman Lemnitzer, who had worked closely with Dulles as the U.S. Army’s point man on the Sunrise negotiations. Lemnitzer shared Dulles’s strong anti-Soviet sentiments, and he had colluded with the OSS official to keep the secret talks with Wolff going forward, even after President Roosevelt and the Allied command thought they had pulled the plug on Sunrise. After the German surrender, the ambitious Lemnitzer had also worked with Dulles to promote Sunrise in the press as an espionage triumph. When Wolff’s letter reached Lemnitzer, he was stationed at the Pentagon, where he had been appointed to a prestigious position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lemnitzer would ultimately rise to become the Army chief of staff under President Kennedy, where once again his career would be fatefully linked with that of Dulles.
As soon as Lemnitzer received the letter from Wolff, who appealed to him “as one general to another” to make sure the Sunrise deal was honored, Lemnitzer smelled trouble. As with his letter to Dulles, Wolff’s appeal to Lemnitzer melded obsequious German courtesy with a flash of steel. Wolff signed off with a clear warning, telling Lemnitzer that he was hoping to resolve the situation “as a comrade” before he was forced to air his grievances “publicly.” Lemnitzer fired off a letter to Dulles, who was in Switzerland at the time, telling him that he was “anxious to discuss this matter with you” as soon as Dulles returned home.
Thus began a series of carefully worded letters and private discussions between the two most prominent Americans who were associated with the Sunrise deal. Dulles, who was savvy enough to never put his agreement with Wolff in writing, warned Lemnitzer to be “very careful” in communicating with Wolff. “He has proved to be a clever, tricky and wily customer,” Dulles cautioned Lemnitzer. The spymaster appeared to have a certain amount of professional respect for the way the Nazi military man had played him.
The circumspect communications between Dulles and Lemnitzer led to a flurry of behind-the-scenes efforts on Wolff’s behalf. The last thing anyone wanted was a “sensational trial,” as Dulles put it, where Wolff would undoubtedly spill the entire Sunrise story.
In March 1948, Wolff was transferred to a detention center in Hamburg, and instead of being tried for war crimes, he was put through a much less threatening “denazification” hearing in a German court. Dulles supplied Wolff’s defense team with a glowing affidavit that was read aloud in the courtroom and concluded, “In my opinion, General Wolff’s action . . . materially contributed to bringing about the end of the war in Italy.” The ever-loyal Gaevernitz showed up as a character witness, testifying for over an hour about Wolff’s Sunrise heroism and insisting, falsely, that the SS general had never “demanded any special treatment after the war.”
The German court was impressed by the defendant’s influential friends. Found guilty of the relatively minor charge of “being a member of the SS with knowledge of its criminal acts,” Wolff received a four-year sentence. Through Dulles’s lobbying efforts, the sentence was reduced to time already served, and in June 1949, Wolff walked out of the men’s prison at Hamburg-Bergedorf a free man. Gaevernitz and other Sunrise intermediaries were there to celebrate the war criminal’s release. “It seemed like old times and we missed you greatly,” he wrote Dulles.
One of the first actions taken by the newly liberated Wolff was to, once again, demand special treatment. He insisted that the U.S. government owed him at least $45,000 for an itemized list of clothing and family belongings that he claimed were looted by U.S. military police from his SS palace in Bolzano after his arrest. The demand for reparations by Himmler’s former right-hand man was, at last, even too much for Dulles. “Between you and me,” an exasperated Dulles wrote the following year to his Swiss intelligence comrade Max Waibel, “KW doesn’t realize what a lucky man he is not to be spending the rest of his days in jail, and his wisest policy would be to keep fairly quiet about the loss of a bit of underwear, etc. He might easily have lost more than his shirt.”
Wolff’s journey now came full circle, as the middle-aged SS veteran returned to the advertising field he had abandoned two decades earlier for a career with Hitler. Landing a job as an advertising sales manager with a weekly magazine in Cologne—courtesy yet again of Dulles, who had helped pave the return to civilian life by ensuring he was not subjected to an employment ban—Wolff quickly proved to be a man on his way up. With the “circle of friends” he had made as Himmler’s banker, Wolff found it easy to establish contacts with the advertising departments of the leading German companies. As his sales soared, so did his commissions. By 1953, he was prosperous enough to buy a manor for his family on Lake Starnberg in southern Bavaria, complete with a dock and bathhouse.
Wolff’s success emboldened him. He began talking more openly about his past to friends and even journalists. He revealed that ten days before Hitler’s suicide in a Berlin bunker, the Führer had promoted him to the rank of senior general of the Waffen-SS, the military wing of Himmler’s empire.
The general wanted it both ways: he wanted to be seen as one of the clean and honorable Germans, but his pride also had him crowing about his grand and loyal service to Hitler’s Reich. Wolff’s ambivalence was highlighted again when he told a newsletter published by an SS veterans club that Hitler had known about and “completely approved” of his Operation Sunrise machinations, presumably as a tactic for buying time and splitting the Allies. Wolff, regarded with disdain by his former SS colleagues for his role in Sunrise, might have been trying to ingratiate himself with his old Nazi brethren. But it was a dubious claim. Eugen Dollmann undoubtedly came closer to the truth when he wrote in his memoir that a fading Hitler—pumped full of drugs during their final meeting in the bunker—gave Wolff “a vague sort of permission to maintain the contact he had established with the Americans.”
In the mid-1950s, the increasingly self-assured Wolff, convinced that Germany needed his leadership, became politically active again. In 1953, he took a lead role in establishing the Reichsreferat, a neofascist party, and in 1956, he began organizing an association of former SS officers. The old ideas came slithering out once more: the demonization of non-Germanic races and the Bolshevist menace, the glorification of power.
Karl Wolff was eager to return to center stage, and who better to help his quest than his powerful American patron? Wolff had stayed in touch with Dulles through the U.S. occupational authorities stationed in Germany, passing him notes and books related to Operation Sunrise that he thought the spymaster might find interesting. After his release from prison, Wolff had developed a side business with U.S. intelligence agencies, selling information to a notorious espionage freebooter named John “Frenchy” Grombach, who had served in Army intelligence. Grombach gathered information from a far-flung network of SS old boys and other ex-Nazis in Europe, peddling it to the CIA, State Department, and corporate clients. But Wolff knew that his best connection in the American intelligence world was Allen Dulles himself, who by 1953 had become chief of the CIA.
On May 20, 1958, Wolff marched confidently into the U.S. embassy in Bonn and asked to see two CIA officers he knew. Informed that those agents were no longer in Bonn, Wolff was escorted into the office of the CIA station chief. As usual, Wolff thoroughly charmed his host, who later reported that he “was most polite, almost ingratiating for a former General.” Wolff, the station chief added, was “sporting a tan which looked as though it had been acquired south of the Alps and exuded prosperity.” Wolff informed his CIA host that he wanted to visit the United States. He wanted to see his daughter, who was married to an American, and his son, who was also residing there. He did not mention the other person he wanted to see, but it was obvious to the station chief. Everyone in the agency’s upper ranks knew about the CIA director’s long and intricate history with Wolff.
Chatting with the Bonn station chief, Wolff soon got to the point. He wanted assurances that he would have no trouble securing a visa for his visit to the United States. Informed about his old wartime collaborator’s wishes, Dulles pulled strings on his behalf in Washington. But the two men were never to be reunited in America. Karl Wolff’s name still stirred too much unease in the bowels of Washington’s bureaucracy. Some foreign service functionaries began asking awkward questions about the general’s wartime activities. There were some specters from the past, realized Dulles, that were best left in the past, to be conjured only in one’s smoothly crafted memoirs. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 4 Sunrise
Karl Wolff was not the only prominent SS officer who greatly benefited from Dulles’s Operation Sunrise. In the fall of 1945, former SS colonel Eugen Dollmann, Wolff’s principal intermediary during the Sunrise negotiations, found himself living in a gilded cage in Rome. The apartment, which was located on Via Archimede, a quiet, horseshoe-shaped street in the city’s exclusive Parioli district, contained few distractions for the bored Dollmann. But he did discover an extensive sadomasochistic literary collection left behind by the former tenant, a German mistress of Mussolini, and he whiled away the hours reading about feverishly inventive ways to mortify the flesh. Dollmann was not an entirely free man, since he was a guest of U.S. intelligence officers. But, even though he remained under close surveillance, compared to his accommodations after he and Karl Wolff were arrested in May, the colonel’s Parioli lifestyle was sublime.
Before he was spirited off to Rome by the Strategic Services Unit, the agency that replaced the disbanded OSS after the war, the Nazi diplomat had been installed in a temporary cell at Cinecittà Studios. Spoiled by years of the best Italian cuisine, Dollmann found the rations at Cinecittà so distasteful that he considered joining a hunger strike started by fellow POW Gudrun Himmler, the late Reichsführer’s daughter. Then he was transferred to a POW camp in Ascona, on picturesque Lake Maggiore, where the daily fare—consisting mainly of watery pea soup—was even more objectionable, and the inmates were forced to sleep in tents that floated away in heavy downpours. Dollmann later had the nerve to compare Ascona to Dachau. “At least in Dachau they had wooden huts,” he observed.
Relief for Dollmann came when he was transferred to a low-security prison camp run by the British military in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast. One night, Dollmann found it remarkably easy—one American intelligence agent would call it “suspiciously” easy—to cut through the wires encircling Rimini and flee to Milan, where he knew he would find sanctuary. Here Dollmann presented himself to the well-connected cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster in the prelate’s palazzo adjoining the enormous Gothic cathedral. Dollmann, known as one of Rome’s more elegant peacocks during his SS glory days, now sat before the eminent cardinal in a filthy raincoat, looking the worse for wear after his frantic trek from Rimini.
As they sipped liqueur from long-stemmed glasses, Dollmann reflected on how the cardinal always put him in mind of “a delicate alabaster statue.” But Schuster, who had worked with Wolff’s SS team on the Sunrise deal, was not as refined as all that. The wily cardinal was part of the Vatican elite that had collaborated with Mussolini’s fascist regime—and, out of self-interest, he was inclined to help Dollmann now, to avoid an embarrassing war crimes trial. Besides, Schuster thought that men like Dollmann might still play a useful role in postwar Italy; he hoped to recruit the former SS officer in the campaign against the Church’s nemesis, the Italian Communists, who had emerged from the war as a powerful political force.
Dollmann, who was conniving by nature but not political, was uninterested in the cardinal’s plot, but he was in no position to quibble. He allowed himself to be safely hidden away in a Church-run asylum for wealthy drug addicts, where his fellow inmates included a fading Italian film diva and an emotionally fragile duchess. As he languished among the delicato junkies, Dollmann decided to sample some of the forbidden fruit that the screen siren kept stashed in her room, snorting a snowy mound of heroin. For a time, Dollmann—who had much to forget in his life, but was plagued by a detailed memory—seemed in danger of disappearing among the lotus eaters.
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By serving as the essential diplomatic link between Germany and Italy, Dollmann ensured that his sojourn in his adopted land would not be interrupted by the coming war. Dollmann would point to this as the primary reason why he made his Faustian bargain. Italia was the great passion of his life. “I loved Italy with the doomed love of all German romantics.”
It was the most peculiar of ironies, and one that Dollmann and his intimates no doubt privately relished. The man who kept the Axis partners smoothly aligned, with his impressive language and social skills, was a highly educated, arts-loving homosexual who enjoyed trading in the most salacious gossip about the personalities who ruled Germany and Italy. Dollmann was, in short, precisely the type of person the Nazis sent to the gas chambers. But instead, Hitler’s interpreter was free to attend gay and lesbian orgies in Venice, a city whose shadows offered some protection from the authorities’ prying eyes. And he had the pleasure of going on shopping safaris with Eva Braun, Hitler’s companion, during her Italian holidays.
Braun was mad for crocodile shoes and accessories. “She loved crocodile in every shape and form, and returned to her hotel looking as if she had come back from a trip up the Congo rather than along the Tiber.”
Dollmann was fond of Braun, a sweet and simple young woman who confided her sad life to him. She was known throughout the world as the German strongman’s mistress, but, as she confessed to Dollmann, there was no sexual intimacy between her and the Führer. “He is a saint,” Braun told Dollmann wistfully. “The idea of physical contact would be for him to defile his mission. Many times we sit and watch the sun come up after spending the whole night talking. He says to me that his only love is Germany and to forget it, even for a moment, would shatter the mystical forces of his mission.”
Dollmann strongly suspected that the Führer had other passions besides Germany. On Christmas Eve 1923, when he was a university student in Munich, Dollmann had been invited to an extravagant, candlelit party at the home of General Otto von Lossow, who had helped put down Hitler’s Beer Hall putsch in November 1923. During the evening, Lossow took Dollmann and some of his other guests into his parlor, where he entertained them by reading selections from Hitler’s thick police dossier. “In a café near the university on the evening of, Herr Hitler was observed . . .” Lossow’s voice was matter-of-fact as he read through the depositions and eyewitness reports about Germany’s future leader. The general’s small audience listened in rapt silence, transfixed by the portrait of a Hitler who was more interested in boyish men than in national politics.
These were the sorts of tales that Dollmann kept tucked away—stories that would help the consummate survivor navigate what he called the “witches’ cauldron” of Rome as well as Berlin’s dark labyrinth. As the Nazis’ main fixer in Rome, it helped to know everything he could about the dangerous men with whom he was dealing.
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Unsurprisingly, after capturing Dollmann, Pagnotta decided to hang on to him, placing him in a U.S. military prison in Rome instead of handing him over to the British. In the beginning, Dollmann was a cooperative prisoner, readily revealing the address of his apartment on Via Archimede. When Pagnotta’s team raided the apartment, they narrowly missed catching Dollmann’s infamous roommate Walter Rauff, who managed to flee to Bari, on the Adriatic coast, where he boarded a ship for Alexandria, Egypt—the next stop in the Nazi exterminator’s long and winding ratline. Rauff would cap his bloody career in Chile, where he became a top adviser to DINA, military dictator Augusto Pinochet’s own Gestapo. When Rauff died in 1984—at age seventy-seven, after successfully rebuffing years of extradition attempts—hundreds of aging Nazis flocked to his funeral in Santiago, where he was laid to rest amid loud salutes of “Heil Hitler!”
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Nonetheless, Dollmann would soon find himself in Italy—at least briefly—after he outstayed his welcome in Switzerland. According to a U.S. intelligence report, Dollmann was expelled from Switzerland in February 1952 after he was caught having sex with a Swiss police official. In desperation, Dollmann appealed to his old fascist friends in the Italian church, and he was spirited across the border and given temporary sanctuary at a Franciscan monastery in Milan. Dollmann’s savior this time, Father Enrico Zucca, was famous for his role in raising Mussolini’s body from the grave on Easter 1946 in preparation for the day when Il Duce would be reburied with full honors on Rome’s Capitoline Hill. The abbot had less spectacular plans for Dollmann. He slipped a monk’s habit on him and smuggled him onto a boat in Genoa, from where Dollmann was shipped to General Franco’s fascist paradise in Spain.
In Madrid, Dollmann came under the protection of former Nazi commando leader Otto Skorzeny, who had put together a wide-ranging racket, trading in arms and helping SS fugitives flee justice. Skorzeny was joined for a time in Spain by Hjalmar Schacht, who had been acquitted at Nuremberg and would parlay his reputation as Hitler’s banker into a postwar career as an international financial consultant. Schacht knew where much of the wealth plundered from Europe by German corporations and Nazi officials had been hidden, and Skorzeny used this inside knowledge to help finance his SS ratlines. Angleton also found Skorzeny’s services useful, and he kept in regular touch with the entrepreneurial ex-Nazi. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 2015 5 Ratlines
Clover later tormented herself for not being more attuned to her brother’s emotional condition as she prepared for her wedding. But she herself was in a state of great anxiety. “To me it was a terrible strain being engaged, trying all the time to act the way you suppose a normal person would act, instead of simply jumping out the window the way you naturally would. So I wasn’t thinking very much about my brother.” That December, when the newly wed couple arrived in Constantinople, Allen’s next diplomatic port of call, Clover heard that Paul had suffered a nervous breakdown and been confined to a fashionable sanitarium in Greenwich, Connecticut. In November 1921, after being discharged, the twenty-one-year-old was found dead in bushes alongside a road not far from the sanitarium. He had shot himself between the eyes with a revolver.
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Mary, whose mother died hours after giving birth to her, was raised by her grandparents in a comfortable Cambridge, Massachusetts, household dominated by men whose ambitions always seemed just beyond their reach. Her grandfather was a former mayor of Cambridge and Harvard overseer who was once talked about as a candidate for governor but never made it beyond municipal politics. Her father had been a precocious young scholar, entering Harvard at the age of fourteen and graduating summa cum laude three years later. He became a lawyer and, like his father, a pillar of civic affairs, winning appointment as the director of the Port of Boston. But the top rung of power eluded Mary’s father, too, and, overcome by the disappointments of his life, he committed suicide in middle age. The man who made the biggest impression on young Mary was a step or two away from her immediate family, Clarence W. Barron, the short, white-bearded, twinkly-eyed publisher of The Wall Street Journal and the stepfather of her stepmother. She spent as much time as she could in “CW’s” lively vortex, watching him dictate memos from bed until noon and sending the male secretaries who were always at hand scurrying to and fro. At an early age, Mary became familiar with names like Rockefeller, Morgan, Carnegie, Harriman, Ford, and Du Pont. Their world always seemed to hover tantalizingly just beyond her fingertips.
Mary was disappointed in marriage. Her first husband—the father of her two children—turned out to be a dull company man. Her second—a French-Swiss banker who traveled frequently on business to the Balkans and the Far East—promised to be more exotic. But once she was installed in his Zurich home, they settled into a marriage of convenience that left Mary ready for more adventure.
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But Allen Dulles had other plans for his daughter.
While Joan was living in Vienna, her father introduced her to one of his young agents from the war, a well-born and well-connected Austrian named Fritz Molden. The son of a prominent newspaper editor and a widely respected author and poet, Molden and his family had suffered cruelly at the hands of the Gestapo during the war. After escaping from a Wehrmacht punishment battalion on the eastern front that he had been forced to join, Molden took up with the Austrian resistance, where he was put in touch with Dulles. Molden grew attached to Dulles, though the spymaster kept asking the young man to “prove himself” by risking his life for him. After the war, the Communists accused Molden of continuing to work as a paid agent for Dulles, but he denied it.
When Joan and Fritz married in spring 1948, it was clearly a marriage of convenience—for Joan’s father and her new husband. Molden, who became secretary to Austrian foreign minister Karl Gruber after the war and later an influential journalist and diplomat, was a vital intelligence connection for Dulles. The marriage was also a wise move for Molden. For the young, ambitious Austrian, having Allen Dulles as a father-in-law was obviously a big feather in his cap. But the match proved much less successful for Joan.
Just like her mother many years before, Joan had great difficulty explaining why she had married her husband. Joan suffered the same severe pre-wedding doubts that Clover had before marrying Allen. Joan found Fritz a “very erratic character, always given to creating dramatic situations,” as she later wrote her mother. She worried about marrying “someone who wasn’t ever satisfied with the simple everyday aspects of life.” But, in the end, Joan gave in to the implacable intensity of her suitor and went through with the marriage, resigning herself to the fact that she would never have children or enjoy a stable family life with such a man.
Her marriage to Molden, who openly reveled in the company of other women, soon developed a striking resemblance to that of her parents. He often disappeared on mysterious rendezvous, leaving her to wonder when she would see him again.
“Fritz was a ladies’ man, that’s for sure,” Joan recalled years later. “He was so extroverted that you just never knew where he was. He’d say, ‘Let’s rent a sailing ship in the Greek islands,’ and I didn’t know how many of his girlfriends would be on board or for how long we’d be at sea. Do I see similarities with my father? Probably, probably.”
Joan divorced Molden in 1954, but, as if to not disappoint her father, she quickly replaced him with another high-ranking Austrian diplomat named Eugen Buresch. The son of a former Austrian chancellor, Buresch had succeeded Molden as director of the Austrian Information Service in New York. The following year, after being named Austria’s ambassador to Iran, Buresch took Joan off to Tehran, another highly sensitive diplomatic posting. Joan suddenly found herself amid the imperial splendor of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s court, the emperor reinstalled on the Peacock Throne by her father, after the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953.
Joan gave birth to two children with Buresch, a boy and girl. Like Fritz Molden, Joan’s second choice for a husband seemed crafted primarily for her father’s professional benefit. Iran was not only an oil-rich nation, it was a strategically located CIA surveillance platform bordering the Soviet Union. To have a son-in-law acting as his eyes and ears inside the shah’s court was an espionage boon for Dulles, who by then was running the CIA.
But, again, the marriage turned out to be much less beneficial for Joan. In July 1959, Joan wrote her father a painful letter, made all the more poignant by its resolutely upbeat tone, informing him that she and Buresch had separated. Joan, who was living with her young children in Switzerland at the time, had recently visited her parents in Washington but found it easier to tell her father about the failure of her second marriage through the post. The separation had not been her idea, she assured her father—she “would have gone on trying endlessly for the sake of the children,’’ she wrote. But, in any case, she was “very glad to be alone again.”
Joan had good reason to welcome the breakup. Buresch, it turned out, had a violent streak. “Every six months, or every time I do something he doesn’t approve of,” she wrote her father, “he gets terrible fits of rage and tries to beat me up, etc. etc. Last summer, because I tried to come to Europe to see mother, he nearly kicked me out.” When she said, “kicked me out,” Joan added, she meant it “literally.” Apparently Buresch vented his fury with his feet as well as his fists.
Joan did not dwell on the abuse that “Gino,” as she called her husband, meted out. She was much more concerned that her father not worry about her, or worse, write her off as a hopeless case after the collapse of her second marriage. “Pa, you will think indeed that you have a black sheep in me, but I am glad to be free, I shall live alone and bring up my children, mind my own business and I am sure I will be happy.” David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 6 Useful People
In June 1949, Dulles organized the National Committee for a Free Europe in conjunction with an illustrious board that included General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille, and Time-Life publishing magnate (and close friend) Henry Luce. Ostensibly a private philanthropic group, the committee was actually a CIA front that channeled funds to anti-Communist European émigrés and financed major propaganda efforts like Radio Free Europe. At least $2 million of the money poured into the committee’s clandestine projects came from the Nazi gold that Dulles had helped track down at the end of the war. In the early years of the Cold War, the Nazi treasure looted from Jewish families and German-occupied nations would become a key source of funding for Dulles’s secret operations.
Private citizen Dulles further spread his influence by inserting close allies like Frank Wisner in key intelligence posts. Like Dulles, Wisner was a former Wall Street lawyer who had fallen for the glamour of espionage life. In 1949, Dulles helped create a new intelligence outpost and buried it in the State Department bureaucracy under a purposefully dull name—the Office of Policy Coordination. Despite its innocuous title, the OPC would evolve into the kind of combative agency that Dulles envisioned the CIA becoming in a Dewey administration. Wisner was maneuvered into position as OPC chief, and under his gung ho leadership, the obscure unit quickly threw itself into the black arts of espionage, including sabotage, subversion, and assassination. By 1952, the OPC was running forty-seven overseas stations, and its staff had ballooned to nearly three thousand employees, with another three thousand independent contractors in the field.
Dulles and Wisner were essentially operating their own private spy agency. The OPC was run with little government oversight and few moral restrictions. Many of the agency’s recruits were ex-Nazis. While President Truman continued to regard the primary purpose of an intelligence agency as the gathering of information for the president and his national security advisers, Dulles and Wisner were engaged in their own no-holds-barred war with the Soviet bloc. They saw Eastern Europe as their primary battlefield in the great struggle to roll back the Soviet advance, but their field of combat often strayed into the sovereign territory of U.S. allies such as France, West Germany, and Italy.
During World War II, Dulles had resolutely pursued his own initiatives in Switzerland, often in conflict with the policies of President Roosevelt. Now, in the early years of the Cold War, he was doing the same, directly under the nose of another Democratic president. Although the OPC’s tactics had been sanctioned by a National Security Council memo titled “NSC 10/2,” which had been formulated in the heat of the 1948 presidential campaign—when Truman was fending off Dewey and the Republicans’ charges that he was soft on Communism—it is uncertain how fully informed the president was about the exploits of the Office of Policy Coordination.
Whether or not Truman was fully briefed, Wisner pursued his job with a sense of daring abandon, dreaming up ever more inventive and dangerous ways to disrupt Soviet rule over its European dominion. Wisner would present his ideas to Dulles, as if the Sullivan and Cromwell attorney were still his boss. Dulles found one of Wisner’s brainstorms particularly intriguing. The idea was sparked in May 1949 when British intelligence informed Wisner that one of Dulles’s former wartime assets, a man named Noel Field, was planning to fly to Prague, where an attractive academic post was being dangled before him. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 7 Little Mice
Dulles and his clients in the banking and oil industries had ample reason to target Voorhis, a five-term Democratic congressman and ardent New Dealer from Nixon’s home district in Southern California. The crusading congressman was a particularly troublesome thorn in the sides of Wall Street and Big Oil. Voorhis shook the banking industry by pushing for the federal government to take over the nation’s privately owned, regional Federal Reserve Banks—a radical proposal that briefly won President Roosevelt’s support, but ultimately failed to overcome the banking lobby. Voorhis was more successful in his efforts to curb the power of the major oil companies. In 1943, after learning that the Navy was about to grant Standard Oil exclusive drilling rights in the sprawling Elk Hills naval reserve in central California, Voorhis exposed the sweetheart deal and succeeded in blocking it. The congressman earned yet more of the oil industry’s wrath by taking aim at one of the industry’s most cherished tax breaks, the oil depletion allowance, and by stopping offshore drilling plans along the California coast.
Voorhis also posed a direct legal threat to the Dulles brothers through his efforts to shine a light on the wartime collusion between Sullivan and Cromwell clients like Standard Oil and DuPont chemical company and Nazi cartels such as IG Farben. Voorhis further unnerved the Dulles circle by demanding a congressional investigation of the controversial Bank for International Settlements, charging that bank president Thomas McKittrick, a close associate of the Dulles brothers, was a Nazi collaborator.
Corporate America viewed Washington politicians like Voorhis as the personification of their New Deal nightmare. In his midforties, Voorhis had the granite-jawed good looks of a movie star. He also combined the same upper-class breeding and populist instincts that made Roosevelt such a formidable threat. The son of an automobile executive, Voorhis was educated at the Hotchkiss School and Yale. But as a young man, he rejected his privileged background, marrying a social worker, going to work on a Ford assembly line, and becoming a Socialist. He changed his registration to the Democratic Party in 1934 when he entered California politics, but his congressional voting record demonstrated he was a stalwart of the party’s left wing.
In 1944, Voorhis published a book titled Beyond Victory, making clear that, as a leader of the progressive caucus in Congress, he was determined to keep pushing for ambitious reforms in postwar America. Voorhis sent alarms through the ranks of his corporate foes by calling for the nationalization of the transportation, energy, and utility industries as well as sweeping banking reforms. He wanted to create a national credit union to compete with private banks and to expand the Social Security system as a way to establish a nationwide minimum income.
Voorhis’s business opponents began searching for a strong candidate to unseat their nemesis long before the 1946 congressional race. While still in uniform, Nixon was recruited to run against the popular progressive by Herman Perry, a family friend who managed the Bank of America’s Whittier branch. Nixon later insisted that no powerful interests were behind his political debut, just “typical representatives of the Southern California middle class: an auto dealer, a bank manager, a printing salesman, a furniture dealer.” But Voorhis knew the truth. He later wrote in an unpublished memoir that he had been targeted by powerful East Coast bankers and oilmen, who saw him as “one of the most dangerous men in Washington.” In the fall of 1945, according to Voorhis, one major New York banker flew to Southern California, where he sat down with local bankers and “bawled them out” for allowing such a progressive firebrand to represent their district.
Nixon knew that it would take a large campaign war chest to defeat the five-term Voorhis—and he also made clear that he was not interested in running for office if it meant taking a pay cut. Republican business circles in New York and Los Angeles quickly rallied to make the campaign against Voorhis worth the effort of their candidate. An executive for Gladding, McBean, a major ceramics manufacturer whose chairman sat on Standard Oil’s board, later recalled how the corporate message on behalf of Nixon was delivered. At a meeting of seventy-five executives held at an exclusive Ojai, California, resort, the president of Gladding, McBean touted the “young man fresh out of the Navy” who had been lined up for the congressional race. “Smart as all get out. Just what we need to get rid of Jerry Voorhis. . . . He says he can’t live on a congressman’s salary. Needs a lot more than that to match what he knows he could make in private law practice. The boys need cash to make up the difference. We’re going to help.”
Gladding, McBean became a key generator of cash for Nixon, shaking down its own executives for campaign contributions and spreading the word to other corporate donors. The company president demanded that his fellow executives deliver the money in cash to his office. “We just gotta get rid of that pinko Voorhis,” he exhorted his team. The strong-arm appeal worked. Gladding, McBean alone raised at least $5,000 from its executive ranks, the equivalent of over $65,000 today. Together, Nixon’s corporate backers amassed a campaign “pot big enough to engulf the world,” as the Gladding, McBean financial officer later put it.
Gladding, McBean had a modest enough corporate profile to escape the scrutiny of election officials, but its board of directors boasted a variety of high-profile connections in the political and financial worlds. One director, Los Angeles corporate attorney Herman Phleger, had worked with Allen Dulles in postwar Germany and would later serve his brother as the State Department’s legal adviser. The Nixon-Voorhis contest took place on the opposite side of the country from the East Coast power centers—in a remote suburban California district where orange groves still dominated the landscape—but its outcome would help shape national politics for years to come.
As the congressional race heated up in summer 1946, it became clear to Nixon’s wealthy supporters that they had backed the right man to unseat Voorhis. The Republican challenger ran a ruthless campaign, cutting up the incumbent as an ineffectual left-wing dreamer, a Communist Party sympathizer, and a tool of Red-dominated labor unions—none of which was true. In fact, Voorhis had long battled against Communist Party encroachment in liberal organizations and had even spearheaded a 1940 bill requiring the registration of political groups that were affiliated with foreign powers—a law aimed as much at the Moscow-dominated CPUSA as it was against the pro-Hitler German-American Bund. But in Nixon’s skilled hands, Voorhis’s support for New Deal programs like school lunches became evidence of his obedience to the Communist Party line. In the final stretch of the campaign, Nixon released one last cloud of poison. Voters throughout the district began receiving anonymous phone calls, which turned out to emanate from Nixon campaign boiler rooms. “This is a friend of yours, but I can’t tell you who I am,” went a typical call. “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?”
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Nevertheless, Malaxa was savvy enough to realize that his future was not bright in a Communist Romania. He had already taken the precaution of salting away much of his huge fortune in U.S. accounts. After the war, by making a generous distribution of bribes—including jewels, Cadillacs, and cash—Malaxa persuaded Romanian officials to allow him to travel to the United States, ostensibly on trade business for the country. He arrived in 1946 and never returned home.
Malaxa wisely chose to apply for permanent residency, instead of American citizenship, knowing the process was not as demanding. But his résumé was so eyebrow raising that his battle to stay in the United States would drag on for years. Malaxa’s OSS, CIA, FBI, and INS files bulged with condemnations of his morally dexterous, shape-shifting life. One government report labeled him “notorious.” Another called him “the most perfidious man in Romania.” He was a “master of the art of bribery” who had ushered in an “era of corruption” in Romania. He was a flagrant “opportunist” who “had been on all sides of the fence at various times.” He had gone from playing “Hitler’s game” to someone who “must be considered an agent of the Soviet government and of the Romanian Communists in the United States, even if he himself is not a Communist at heart.”
According to a 1952 CIA memo, “perhaps the most concise appraisal of Malaxa” came from an American diplomat who found him “entirely unscrupulous, turning with the wind, and like a cat [he] has developed to a high art the knack of landing on his feet. He is considered to be essentially a dangerous type of man.”
None of this mattered to Allen Dulles when Malaxa turned up at his office at Sullivan and Cromwell. The pertinent fact was that the Romanian had a huge fortune, and he was willing to spend millions of it where Dulles wanted him to. In return for financing Dulles’s far-flung anti-Communist network—which stretched from Buenos Aires to Bucharest—Malaxa secured Dulles’s influential help in his battle to stay in the United States. Some of Malaxa’s treasure went to prominent Romanian exile leaders who hoped to take power after the Communist regime was toppled. Other funds went to Juan Perón’s Argentina, where Malaxa was involved in a rising neofascist movement, and France, where he underwrote “scholarships” for exiled Romanian “students” who turned out to be veterans of the vicious Iron Guard.
By 1948, Malaxa was ensconced in a luxurious apartment on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, but his wheeling and dealing had begun to attract unwanted press attention. In May, gossip columnist Walter Winchell exposed the notorious collaborator who was freely enjoying the city’s pleasures—the “Balkanazi on Broadway,” he called Malaxa. Winchell noted that the “distinguished” firm of Sullivan and Cromwell had recently dropped the Romanian as a client, presumably because he had grown too hot.
But Dulles did not abandon Malaxa; behind the scenes, he entrusted the Romanian’s immigration battle to his political protégé Nixon. In return for Malaxa’s substantial gift of $100,000, the California senator began vigorously lobbying INS officials on his behalf and pushing an immigration bill through Congress that was designed to win Malaxa U.S. residency. When those efforts stalled due to determined resistance from legislators who were repelled by the émigré’s past, Malaxa and Nixon tried a different tack. With the help of Nixon cronies in Southern California, Malaxa announced that he was setting up a pipeline factory in Whittier that he called the Western Tube Corporation. Nixon wrote a letter to the Defense Production Administration, claiming that Malaxa’s project was “strategically and economically important, for both California and the entire United States.” The Western Tube factory was never built, but the phantom project succeeded in winning Malaxa a huge tax windfall. And it kept alive the Romanian’s immigration campaign. California congressman John Shelley later denounced the Western Tube affair as “a complete fraud, a springboard for [Malaxa’s] entry to the United States.”
As the smoldering Malaxa scandal threatened to erupt into flames in the final days of the 1952 presidential race, Dulles moved quickly to douse it. After Wisner and Mason showed him Malaxa’s $100,000 check, the deputy CIA director knew that he would have to send it up the chain of command to his boss, General Walter Bedell Smith. But Dulles also realized that, in this case, passing the buck was as good as destroying the evidence. CIA director “Beetle” Smith had served as Eisenhower’s intensely dedicated chief of staff during the war, and he was just as devoted to Ike’s presidential victory as Dulles.
It was Gordon Mason who was given the unpleasant task of showing the evidence of Nixon’s corruption to General Smith, who predictably flew into a rage. “Smith was a man who could cuss in three languages and in almost every sentence,” recalled Mason. “He also had a violent temper, and he acted as though I personally was trying to scuttle Eisenhower.” Smith demanded that Mason immediately gather up every scrap of incriminating material against Nixon and bring it to his office. “The story was cleaned from the books,” said Mason. Wisner, too, had no doubt what was done with the evidence. “Beetle just flushed it all down the toilet.”
Without a copy of the Malaxa check, Drew Pearson could not keep the story going, and it soon petered out. On Election Day, Eisenhower and Nixon swept to a decisive victory, winning 55 percent of the vote and carrying thirty-nine of the forty-eight states.
After the Republican triumph, Dulles and Nixon were finally able to speed Malaxa’s immigration case through the bureaucracy. In December 1953, officials in Eisenhower’s Justice Department bypassed Congress and the INS and granted Malaxa permanent residence through an administrative decree. Justice Department officials explained that they had reached their decision due to the unique technical services provided by the Western Tube Corporation. The fact that Malaxa’s company did not actually exist—and never would—was politely overlooked by the new administration. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 8 Scoundrel Time
Mills considered himself an intellectual loner—“I am a politician without a party,” he wrote in a letter. But The Power Elite touched a deep chord with a rising new generation of revolutionaries and radicals that was soon to make its impact on history. Young Fidel Castro and Che Guevara pored over the book in the Sierra Maestra mountains. And, at home, Tom Hayden drew heavily on Mills’s writing for the Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of the emerging New Left.
By the time the Port Huron Statement was presented to the Students for a Democratic Society convention in June 1962, C. Wright Mills was dead—felled by a heart attack in March of that year, at age forty-five. But his critique of the power elite—and his sense of its fundamental, undemocratic illegitimacy—would continue to heavily influence the 1960s generation. Six years after his death, in the wake of the global youth uprisings of 1968, the CIA continued to identify him as one of the leading intellectual threats to the established order.
Schlesinger was partly right about Mills. Though he was a rigorous researcher and a careful craftsman, The Power Elite did indeed resound here and there with a prophet’s moral urgency. Mills, who was deeply concerned about the runaway nuclear arms race of the Eisenhower era, knew that America’s rulers not only possessed terrifying instruments of violence, these men felt largely unrestrained by democratic checks and balances. The ability of American leaders to end life on the planet imbued them with a dark power in Mills’s mind—one that inspired impassioned passages like the concluding paragraph of The Power Elite:
The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. . . . They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility.
Men like the Dulles brothers rejoiced in such “organized irresponsibility.” Democracy, in their minds, was an impediment to the smooth functioning of the corporate state. John Foster Dulles had made this clear early in his Wall Street career as he jousted with FDR’s New Deal bureaucracy. Complaining to Lord McGowan, chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, about government efforts to control the spiraling power of global cartels, Foster once acidly remarked, “The fact of the matter is that most of these politicians are highly insular and nationalistic . . . [so] business people . . . have had to find ways for getting through and around stupid political barriers.” Allen, for his part, had gone through his espionage career with similar disdain for presidential directives and “stupid political barriers.” As Richard Helms put it, with typically droll understatement, “There can be no question that Dulles felt most comfortable running things on his own with a minimum of supervision from above.”
When Franklin Roosevelt moved into the White House in 1933, he was well aware of the entrenched interests that he would be confronting as he attempted to reform the country’s financial system and to create a social buffer against the havoc of the Depression. “The real truth,” FDR wrote to Colonel Edward M. House, President Wilson’s close adviser, “as you and I know, is that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” For a brief period during the widespread devastation of the 1930s, the New Deal was able to challenge this “plutocracy,” as Roosevelt called it. The Roosevelt presidency did not dismantle the power elite, Mills later wrote, “but it did create within the political arena, as well as in the corporate world itself, competing centers of power that challenged those of the corporate directors.”
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During the 1952 presidential race, Dulles proved his loyalty to the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign by channeling funds to the Republican ticket through CIA front groups and by leaking embarrassing intelligence reports to the media about the Truman administration’s handling of the Korean War—flagrant violations of the CIA charter that forbids agency involvement in domestic politics.
But even though Smith recruited Dulles for the agency and made him his deputy, he never warmed up to his number two man. “Beetle”—who, as Eisenhower’s former wartime aide, enjoyed unique access to the president-elect—became an impediment to Dulles’s CIA ascension following the Republican victory. “After two years of close personal observation,” wrote a CIA historian, “Smith lacked confidence in Dulles’s self-restraint.” The general felt that Dulles was too enamored of the dark arts of the spy trade. Smith would tell friends that running the CIA sometimes made it necessary to leave his moral values outside the door. But, he quickly added, clinging to his soldierly code of conduct, “You’d damned well better remember exactly where you left them.”
Dulles struck Smith as a man who was all too blithe about abandoning his scruples. The deputy CIA director had no qualms about advocating the assassination of foreign leaders, even presenting a plan to Smith in early 1952 to kill Stalin at a Paris summit meeting. Smith firmly rejected the plan. He shuddered at the thought of Dulles taking over the top spot at the agency.
As Smith prepared to step down at the CIA, he lobbied against Dulles as his replacement, advising Eisenhower that it would be politically unwise to have the brother of the secretary of state serve as the administration’s intelligence chief. Instead, Smith urged Eisenhower to select another one of his agency deputies, Lyman Kirkpatrick. Like Dulles, Kirkpatrick was a product of Princeton and had an impressive espionage résumé dating back to the war—but, as his career at the CIA would prove, he also had a well-tuned sense of proper conduct. (Years later, Kirkpatrick would be called upon to direct the internal investigation of the Bay of Pigs debacle that nearly ruined the agency, doing such an honest job that some CIA old boys, including Dulles himself, never forgave him.)
Despite Beetle Smith’s close ties to Eisenhower, he found himself outmaneuvered by the Dulles brothers. Anticipating Smith’s objections, Foster got to Eisenhower first and convinced him that having his brother in charge of the CIA would actually be an asset, ensuring smooth cooperation in the running of foreign policy. When Smith began making his case against Dulles, Eisenhower cut him off, telling his old friend that he had already talked to Foster, who saw no problem at all with a fraternal reign of power.
Smith had never really stood a chance of blocking Allen Dulles. Eisenhower was deeply beholden to the Wall Street Republican power brokers who had not only recruited him for the presidential race but had helped finance his electoral battle, loaned him one of their own—white-shoe lawyer Herbert Brownell Jr.—to run his campaign, and had even tapped Dick Nixon as his running mate. The Dewey-Dulles group was Ike’s brain trust and bank. When these men spoke, the general listened.
Under Allen Dulles, the CIA would become a vast kingdom, the most powerful and least supervised agency in government. Dulles built his towering citadel with the strong support of President Eisenhower, who, despite occasional misgivings about the spymaster’s unrestrained ways, consistently protected him from his Washington enemies. As America extended its postwar reach around the world, with hundreds of military bases in dozens of countries and U.S. oil, mining, agribusiness, and manufacturing corporations operating on every continent, Eisenhower saw the CIA (along with the Pentagon’s nuclear firepower) as the most cost-effective way to enforce American interests overseas. Presidential historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of The Declassified Eisenhower, initially regarded Ike as “a presidential pacifist.” But after examining the administration’s documentary evidence for her 1981 book, Cook arrived at the conclusion that “America’s most popular hero was America’s most covert president. Eisenhower participated in his own cover-up. His presidency involved a thorough and ambitious crusade marked by covert operations that depended on secrecy for their success.”
The rise of Dulles’s spy complex in the 1950s would further undermine a U.S. democracy that, as Mills observed, was already seriously compromised by growing corporate power. The mechanisms of surveillance and control that Dulles put in motion were more in keeping with an expanding empire than they were with a vibrant democracy. As journalist David Halberstam later observed, “The national security complex became, in the Eisenhower years, a fast-growing apparatus to allow us to do in secret what we could not do in the open. This was not just an isolated phenomenon but part of something larger going on in Washington—the transition from an isolationist America to imperial colossus. A true democracy had no need for a vast, secret security apparatus, but an imperial country did. . . . What was evolving was a closed state within an open state.”
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McCarthy was not educated at Ivy League schools, and he was never courted by Wall Street firms. He had worked his way through law school at Marquette University in Milwaukee by pumping gas and going door-to-door selling caulking compound for doors and windows. He liked to drink bourbon, and in 1952, when an operation for a herniated diaphragm cut him open from gut to shoulder and left him in chronic pain, he drank harder still. Even after he was elected to the august U.S. Senate, he carried around a barroom bully’s sense of grievance. He once assaulted Drew Pearson in the cloakroom of the exclusive Sulgrave Club, pinning the muckraker’s arms behind him and kneeing him in the balls—vicious payback for all the columns Pearson had written about McCarthy’s career. And yet, backed in the beginning by Hoover’s investigative apparatus, as well as by the Catholic Church and the right-wing Hearst and McCormick press, the thuggish senator was able to turn his chairmanship of the previously obscure subcommittee into one of the capital’s most powerful perches. Washington’s VIPs hated and feared him, but most paid homage to him.
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Taking on McCarthy at the height of his power was a daunting task, even for the director of the CIA. Dulles knew that, despite J. Edgar Hoover’s growing doubts about McCarthy, the FBI still fed him a stream of damaging information about his Washington enemies. Hoover, a sworn rival ever since Dulles outmaneuvered him to create the CIA in 1947, had amassed a thick file on Dulles and his busy adulterous life. Hoover even suspected Dulles of “secret communist leanings,” a delusion as fantastic as any of McCarthy’s wild claims. At least one high-ranking CIA official—Robert Amory, the agency’s top intelligence analyst—was convinced that the FBI had tapped his office phone.
But Dulles, too, was a master at this sort of game, and he made sure his agency kept its own files on Hoover. Jim Angleton liked to say that any intelligence service that didn’t keep a close eye on its own government wasn’t worth its salt. “Penetration begins at home,” he quipped. The CIA counterintelligence chief was rumored to occasionally show off photographic evidence of Hoover’s intimate relationship with FBI deputy Clyde Tolson, including a photo of Hoover orally pleasuring his longtime aide and companion. Dulles’s wisecracking mistress Mary Bancroft liked to call the FBI director “that Virgin Mary in pants,” but there was nothing virginal about Hoover.
Dulles compiled even more scandalous files on Joe McCarthy’s sex life. The senator who relentlessly hunted down homosexuals in government was widely rumored to haunt the “bird circuit” near Grand Central Station as well as gay hideaways in Milwaukee. Drew Pearson got wind of the stories but was never able to get enough proof to run with them. But the less discriminating Hank Greenspun, editor and publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, who was locked in an ugly war of words with McCarthy, let the allegations fly. Greenspun had been given access to the Pearson files, and he had picked up his own McCarthy stories involving young hotel bellboys and elevator operators during the senator’s gambling trips to Vegas. “Joe McCarthy is a bachelor of 43 years,” wrote Greenspun. “He seldom dates girls and if he does, he laughingly describes it as window dressing. . . . It is common talk among homosexuals who rendezvous at the White Horse Inn [in Milwaukee] that Senator Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities.”
McCarthy’s wedding announcement triggered more wicked chatter in the capital, where many saw it as an obvious ploy to dispel the rumors. The senator was as surprised as many others to read the announcement of his pending nuptials—it was his mother-in-law-to-be who placed the notice in the newspapers. McCarthy’s young bride was described in one gossip magazine as “a bright, shrewd and very ambitious young lady. ‘Opportunist’ was the word many people used.”
One Hoover aide later denied the gay reports about McCarthy, insisting that the allegations were blowback against the senator because he had dared to take on the Dulles brothers. But Hoover kept his own secret files on McCarthy, one of which was filled with disturbing stories about McCarthy’s habit of drunkenly groping young girls’ breasts and buttocks. The stories were so widespread that they became “common knowledge” in the capital, according to one FBI chronicler. Walter Trohan, Washington bureau chief of the conservative Chicago Tribune, who witnessed McCarthy’s molesting behavior, said, “He just couldn’t keep his hands off young girls. Why the Communist opposition didn’t plant a minor on him and raise the cry of statutory rape, I don’t know.”
“The Communist opposition” might have missed the opportunity, but the CIA was clearly prepared to leak stories about McCarthy’s behavior—stories so sordid, they would have destroyed his career. This gave Dulles leverage in his battle with McCarthy that none of the senator’s other political opponents enjoyed. There was an explosive sexual subtext to the CIA’s power struggle with McCarthy, one that was largely hidden from the public but would eventually erupt in the Senate hearings that brought him down.
What the public witnessed was fascinating enough: a clash of titans that verged on a constitutional crisis. When McCarthy tried to subpoena Bill Bundy, Dulles simply stonewalled him. The agency had Bundy spirited away to an undisclosed location, and when Roy Cohn called to demand that he testify before the subcommittee—that very day—he was told that Bundy was on leave. Walter Pforzheimer, the CIA’s legislative liaison, later remembered the phone call. “Roy was furious. . . . What a fight! Later that day, my secretary tracked me down to tell me Cohn wanted to talk to me [again]. And he wanted me to testify about Bundy’s file.” But Dulles simply “wouldn’t allow it.” When a subpoena arrived for Pforzheimer, the CIA director was unfazed. “Allen Dulles just took it and gave it to somebody. I wanted it for posterity, but no one’s ever found it.”
On July 9, 1953, an outraged McCarthy took to the floor of the Senate to denounce Dulles’s “blatant attempt to thwart the authority of the Senate” and demanded that Dulles himself appear before his subcommittee. Dulles still refused to bend, but he did drop by McCarthy’s office to explain his position. Because of the highly sensitive nature of the CIA’s work, Dulles informed the senator, his agency must be granted immunity from congressional investigations. McCarthy just had to take his word that there were no Communists hidden in the agency. If he ever did find any Reds, Dulles later explained to the press, “I’d kick them out. I have the power to do it and don’t have to have proof they work for the Kremlin. The fact that a man is a Communist would be enough.”
Dulles’s defiant position on congressional oversight astonished even the anti-McCarthy Democrats on the subcommittee, like Senator Stuart Symington. But the CIA director never wavered from his stand, and he soon won Eisenhower’s support. Nixon was again dispatched to meet with McCarthy, to work out a face-saving way for the senator to back down. Soon after, McCarthy announced that he and Dulles had come to a mutual agreement to suspend the probe of the CIA. Dulles drove home his victory by making sure that his friends in the Washington press corps reported McCarthy’s losing confrontation with the CIA as a major humiliation for the senator.
On July 17, syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop—a journalist so deeply entwined with the CIA that he once declared it was his patriotic duty to carry the agency’s water—announced that “Senator Joseph R. McCarthy has just suffered his first total, unmitigated, unqualified defeat. . . . [Administration strategists] have allowed McCarthy to conceal his defeat behind a typical smoke screen of misleading statements. But the background story proves that the junior Senator from Wisconsin went down for the count of ten, all the same.”
Dulles proudly collected newspaper coverage of his battle with McCarthy. He was no doubt particularly pleased by one of the clippings he gathered, an article by The Buffalo Evening News’s Washington correspondent, which reported that the CIA director is “known here as ‘John Foster Dulles’s tougher, younger brother.’”
Not all of the press reaction to Dulles’s display of defiance was so enthusiastic. Two journalistic pillars whom the CIA director considered old friends—syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann and New York Times correspondent Hanson Baldwin—took strong issue with the way Dulles had flouted Senate authority. “The argument that the CIA is something apart, that it is so secret that it differs in kind from the State Department or, for that matter, the Department of Agriculture, in untenable,” Lippmann opined. Baldwin struck an even more critical note, warning of “a philosophy of secrecy and power” taking hold in Washington under the banner of national security.
But Dulles’s firm stand against McCarthy—a man Richard Helms compared to Goebbels—proved enormously popular within the CIA, particularly among the ranks of the liberal, intellectual types whom Dulles had recruited. While Dulles and his family were stalwart Republicans, he recognized that many of the most passionate Cold Warriors were ex-Communists and liberals who not only had firsthand knowledge of bare-knuckled Communist Party practices but were eager to prove their patriotism and join the American celebration. Dulles further cemented his position with this liberal crowd when he stood by CIA recruit Cord Meyer, another bright young product of Yale, who came under FBI suspicion in August 1953 for his postwar peace activities.
After enduring years of relentless harassment from Red hunters, many Washington liberals cheered Dulles as a savior. His CIA became known as a haven for the intelligentsia and for others looked on with suspicion by McCarthyites. “I emerged from [my FBI] ordeal with increased respect for Allen Dulles,” Meyer later wrote. “Dulles proved to be a pillar of courageous strength inside the Eisenhower administration during the McCarthy era. Once he had determined the facts and satisfied himself as to the loyalty of a CIA official, he was prepared to defend him and he refused to give in to the pressures that McCarthy was able to bring to bear. As a result, morale within the agency was high during this period, in contrast to morale in the State Department where John Foster Dulles was less willing to defend the innocent victims of McCarthy’s campaign.”
Dulles’s defiance of McCarthy won the widespread devotion of liberals, but it established a dangerous precedent. In his very first year as director, Dulles began molding an image of the CIA as a super agency, operating high above mere senators. The CIA would grow more powerful and less accountable with each passing year of Dulles’s reign.
McCarthy never got over his rough treatment at the hands of the CIA, and he would threaten on more than one occasion to reopen his investigation of the agency. But if he had, he might have encountered an even more severe response. In March 1954, McCarthy’s subcommittee convened a hearing on “alleged threats against the chairman.” One witness—a military intelligence officer named William Morgan who had worked for C. D. Jackson in the White House—stunned the subcommittee by recounting a conversation that he had the previous year with a CIA employee named Horace Craig. As the two men were discussing how to solve the McCarthy problem, Craig flatly stated, “It may be necessary to liquidate Senator McCarthy as was [assassinated Louisiana senator] Huey Long. There is always some madman who will do it for a price.” David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 9 The Power Elite
Eisenhower’s innate midwestern sense of decency initially made him recoil from backing Britain’s colonial siege of Iran. He rebuffed the Dulles brothers’ advice, suggesting that it might be a better idea to stabilize Mossadegh’s government with a $100 million loan than to topple it. If Eisenhower had followed through on his original instincts, the bedeviled history of U.S.-Iran relations would undoubtedly have taken a far different course.
An air of tragic heroism clung to Mossadegh. When American envoys made a last-ditch effort to persuade him to appease the British oil giant, he proudly refused. The history of Iran’s leadership was plagued by cowardice and corruption, said Mossadegh, and he would not continue this sorry legacy. Anglo-Iranian Oil had already been offered fair compensation for its losses; Mossadegh would not compromise the resource rights of his country any further. If he cut a deal with the British, the prime minister told U.S. mediators, his reputation would be forever stained with the Iranian people, who would immediately assume that their nation had been sold out once more. Mossadegh’s adamant defense of Iranian sovereignty made him a beloved figure in his homeland, with a popular referendum at the height of the Iran crisis giving him nearly unanimous support.
Realizing that Eisenhower was not inclined to defend British imperial interests, the Dulles brothers reframed their argument for intervention in Cold War terms. On March 4, 1953, Allen appeared at a National Security Council meeting in the White House armed with seven pages of alarming talking points. Iran was confronted with “a maturing revolutionary set-up,” he warned, and if the country fell into Communist hands, 60 percent of the free world’s oil would be controlled by Moscow. Oil and gasoline would have to be rationed at home, and U.S. military operations would have to be curtailed.
In truth, the global crisis over Iran was not a Cold War conflict but a struggle “between imperialism and nationalism, between First and Third Worlds, between North and South, between developed industrial economies and underdeveloped countries dependent on exporting raw materials,” in the words of Ervand Abrahamian. Dulles made Mossadegh out to be a “stooge” of the Communists—but he was far from it. The scion of an aristocratic Persian family, the prime minister was educated in France and Switzerland, and tilted more toward the West than in the direction of Iran’s feared Soviet neighbor to the north. Mossadegh was a fervent nationalist, not a secret Communist—another Gandhi, in the assessment of one British foreign official, not a Mao. The Tudeh, Iran’s Communist Party, regarded Mossadegh with a decided wariness, viewing him as a “liberal bourgeois” with dangerous illusions about America. Mossadegh, in turn, relied on the Tudeh’s support when it suited him but kept his distance, seeing the party as too subservient to Moscow. Meanwhile, Soviet leadership remained reluctant to get too deeply involved in Iranian politics for fear of threatening the West’s interests there.
But after weeks of intensive lobbying by the Dulles brothers and the British government, Eisenhower became convinced that Iran was a Cold War battleground and that Mossadegh had to go. In June 1953, Allen presented the CIA plan to overthrow Mossadegh’s government to his brother at a special meeting of national security policy makers held in Foster’s office.
The coup plan had been drawn up by Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., Allen’s handpicked man to run the operation on the ground in Iran. The well-bred grandson of Theodore Roosevelt did not seem like the sort of cutthroat character to carry out such a disreputable task. Roosevelt was well regarded even by ideological enemies like Kim Philby. “Oddly enough, I dubbed [Roosevelt] ‘the quiet American’ five years before Graham Greene wrote his book,” Philby once noted. “He was a courteous, soft-spoken Easterner with impeccable social connections, well-educated rather than intellectual, pleasant and unassuming as host and guest. An equally nice wife. In fact, the last person you would expect to be up to the neck in dirty tricks.”
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The problem with Eisenhower’s strategy was that by keeping Washington in a constant state of high alert, he empowered the most militant voices in his administration, including the Dulles brothers and Pentagon hard-liners like Admiral Arthur Radford and Air Force general Curtis LeMay—who, taking their commander in chief at his word, continually agitated for a cataclysmic confrontation with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower once said that he feared his own “boys” in the military more than he did a sneak attack from the Soviets, who, as he observed, had suffered so devastatingly during World War II that they would be deeply reluctant to risk World War III. The president did not think any of his nuclear commanders would go rogue, but he knew that the constant Pentagon pressure for bigger doomsday arsenals produced equally strong temptations to use the weapons—particularly while the United States still enjoyed a clear margin of nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union.
Eisenhower might have been certain of his ability to rein in the Strangelovian figures in his national security establishment, but his chronic health troubles made his control of the country’s war apparatus seem questionable at times. Eisenhower, who wrestled with high blood pressure, suffered a heart attack in September 1955 that was more serious than the White House publicly admitted. He was not able to return to the Oval Office on a regular basis until January. As the sixty-five-year-old Eisenhower debated whether or not to seek reelection in 1956, his heart specialist advised that there was a fifty-fifty chance he would not live out a second term—an opinion that was also kept secret. Nine months after his heart attack, Eisenhower was operated on for a painful bowel obstruction and remained hospitalized for three weeks. And in November 1957, the president suffered a mild stroke in the Oval Office, which affected his speech and caused severe headaches for weeks. During Eisenhower’s periods of incapacitation, it was Foster Dulles and Vice President Nixon, the Dulles brothers’ acolyte, who moved into the presidential power vacuum. Neither man was known for his sense of moderation in dealing with Communist adversaries.
From the very beginning of the administration, Secretary of State Dulles argued that the United States must overcome the “taboo” against nuclear weapons. At a February 1953 National Security Council meeting, just three weeks into Eisenhower’s presidency, Foster raised what he called “the moral problem” that hovered over all nuclear decision-making. He was not referring to the profound questions about mass slaughter and human survival. Foster meant the moral revulsion against doomsday weapons that prevented policy makers from seriously contemplating their use.
Foster pushed Eisenhower to consider using the ultimate weapons during one crisis after the next, including the climactic stage of the Korean War in 1953, the final French stand in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the battle of nerves with China over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu that same year, and the 1958 confrontation with the Soviets over Berlin. At various, hair-raising moments of these crises, Eisenhower seemed poised to take Foster’s advice, and was only dissuaded by the alarmed opposition of allied leaders or the cooler-headed responses of the Chinese and Soviet governments.
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Nikita Khrushchev, the canny and down-to-earth political survivor who was emerging from the Kremlin’s scrum as the top Soviet leader, closely observed the personal dynamics between Eisenhower and his secretary of state in Geneva and concluded that Foster was in charge. “I watched Dulles making notes with a pencil, tearing them out of a pad, folding them up, and sliding them under Eisenhower’s hand,” Khrushchev later wrote in his memoir. “Eisenhower would pick up these sheets of paper, unfold them, and read them before making a decision on any matter that came up. He followed this routine conscientiously, like a dutiful schoolboy taking his lead from his teacher. It was difficult to imagine how a chief of state could allow himself to lose face like that in front of delegates from other countries. It certainly appeared that Eisenhower was letting Dulles do his thinking for him.”
Before jumping on the Eisenhower bandwagon in 1952, the Dulles brothers calculated that he would not make a strong president. But Ike’s malleability offered its own advantages, in their eyes. As secretary of state, Foster succeeded in undermining or deflecting every tentative step that the president made toward détente with the Soviet Union. In August 1955, following the Geneva Summit, Foster sent out a long cable to all U.S. diplomatic mission chiefs around the world, warning that the free world must not let down its guard despite the air of goodwill wafting out of the conference. “Geneva has certainly created problems for the free nations,” he wrote. “For eight years they have been held together largely by a cement compounded of fear and a sense of moral superiority. Now the fear is diminished and the moral demarcation is somewhat blurred.” The free world must not “relax its vigilance,” he declared, dismissing the post-Stalin Soviet peace efforts as a “classic Communist maneuver.” Hope was Foster’s enemy, fear his righteous sword.
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United Fruit was especially well connected to the Eisenhower administration. As the agribusiness giant began lobbying the White House to overthrow Arbenz, Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, the president’s trusted friend and undersecretary of state, was seeking an executive position with the company. After the coup, he was named to United Fruit’s board of directors. Henry Cabot Lodge, who argued the United Fruit case against Arbenz as Eisenhower’s UN ambassador, belonged to one of the blue-blooded Boston families whose fortunes were long entwined with the banana company. John Moors Cabot, who was in charge of Latin American affairs at the State Department, was the brother of United Fruit’s former chief executive. Even the president’s personal secretary, Ann Whitman, was connected to United Fruit: her husband was the company’s public relations director. But United Fruit had no more powerful friends in the administration than the Dulles brothers.
The Dulleses had served as United Fruit’s lawyers from their earliest days at Sullivan and Cromwell. On the eve of World War I, young Foster made a discreet tour of Central America on behalf of United Fruit, which was growing concerned about labor unrest and creeping Bolshevism in its tropical empire. Upon returning from his corporate spy mission, Foster made a confidential report to his uncle, Robert Lansing, who was not only a former counsel for United Fruit but President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state.
Allen became so frequent a visitor to Guatemala as a legal envoy for United Fruit that he began taking along Clover, who fell under the spell of the country’s beauty and culture. The couple’s Tudor-style home on Long Island’s North Shore was adorned with colorful native fabrics and rugs they brought back from their trips to the banana colony, giving their otherwise ordinary residence a surprisingly exotic touch. But Dulles’s interest in Guatemalan artifacts did not extend to the people who had produced them.
United Fruit’s cries of alarm about Arbenz’s land reform soon produced the same results that Anglo-Iranian Oil’s protestations did in Iran. The Eisenhower-Dulles administration moved swiftly to isolate Guatemala, labeling it a Soviet “beachhead” in the hemisphere. The Arbenz government, Foster charged, was imposing a “Communist-type reign of terror” on the Guatemalan people. Ambassador John Peurifoy, the Dulles brothers’ handpicked man in Guatemala, tried to bribe Arbenz to fall in line, offering him $2 million to abort his land reforms. When that tried-and-true tactic of winning over Latin dictators did not succeed, Arbenz was physically threatened. And when that, too, failed to persuade the resolute leader, the Dulles brothers began arranging for his removal.
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The U.S. press coverage of the Guatemala coup offered a sanitized account, one that smacked of CIA manipulation. The leading newspapers treated the overthrow of Arbenz’s government as a tropical adventure, an “opéra bouffe,” in the words of Hanson Baldwin, one of Dulles’s trusted friends at The New York Times. Nonetheless, reported Baldwin, the operation had “global importance.” This is precisely how Dulles liked his overseas exploits to be chronicled—as entertaining espionage capers, with serious consequences for the Cold War struggle. New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger was extremely accommodating to Dulles throughout the covert operation, agreeing to keep foreign correspondent Sydney Gruson, whom Dulles considered insufficiently compliant, out of Guatemala and even assuring the CIA director that Gruson’s future articles would be screened “with a great deal more care than usual.”
The strangely lighthearted tone of U.S. news dispatches about Guatemala would seep into history books about the CIA and Dulles biographies for years. But, in truth, Guatemala was less opéra bouffe than Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.
The murderous intrigue began long before the actual coup. As early as January 1952, the CIA started plotting to eliminate the top officials of the Arbenz government. Howard Hunt might have wanted to avoid the embarrassment of an Arbenz assassination in full public view, but the CIA had no qualms about compiling a secret “disposal list” of at least fifty-eight key Guatemalan leaders during the planning for the coup. The assassination memo was among several hundred documents relating to the 1954 coup released by the CIA in 1997 during one of the agency’s occasional exercises in carefully managed “openness,” which one critic labeled “a brilliant public relations snow job.” Still, the documents were revealing enough to send shock waves through the international press.
In one of the declassified documents, an unnamed CIA official expressed his confidence on the eve of the Guatemala coup that “the elimination of those in high positions of the [Arbenz] government would bring about its collapse.” Another document—a chillingly detailed, nineteen-page CIA killing manual titled “A Study of Assassination”—offered the most efficient ways to butcher Guatemala’s leadership. “The simplest tools are often the most efficient means of assassination,” the manual helpfully suggested. “A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.” The manual also advised assassins which parts of the body to strike for the most lethal effect, noting that “puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. . . . Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region.” The authors of the manual did make a passing reference to the morality of killing elected leaders of a sovereign nation. “Murder is not morally justified,” the manual briefly acknowledged. “Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.”
The CIA compiled its death list with bureaucratic diligence, circulating the names of those nominated to die within agency departments and among Guatemala’s military plotters, and asking for comments (as well as suggestions for the names of additional targets) like an interoffice memo. Because the CIA deleted the names on the list when it declassified the document, there is no way to tell how many—or if any—of the fifty-eight or more prominent Guatemalans were eventually assassinated. But what is known is that by training and encouraging Guatemala’s new military masters in the art of political murder, the CIA injected a death spore into the nation’s bloodstream that would wreak havoc for decades. (David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 10 The Dulles Imperium
Gehlen quickly dispensed with the usual pleasantries and proceeded to present an urgent report on the state of European security. France and Italy, he said, seemed to be moving toward “the reestablishment of [left-center] Popular Front governments.” Likewise, political trends in West Germany could lead to the fall of Adenauer’s conservative government and its replacement by a coalition including the Social Democratic Party and “anti-Adenauer elements of the Right.” Though not Communistic itself, such a government would inevitably take a softer, “neutralist” line toward the Soviet Union, Gehlen predicted, and he himself “would not survive” in this pro-détente atmosphere. If a government like this took over in Bonn, Gehlen warned, it would be “vulnerable to political penetration and eventual control by the East.”
After painting this ominous portrait, Gehlen got to the heart of the matter. He was prepared to take drastic action to prevent such a political scenario from unfolding in Bonn—going as far as to overthrow democracy in West Germany if necessary. Critchfield immediately reported on his startling conversation with Gehlen in a cable sent directly to Dulles in Washington. In the event of a leftward shift in Bonn, Critchfield informed the CIA director, “UTILITY would feel morally justified in taking all possible action, including the establishment of an illegal apparatus in the Federal Republic, to oppose elements in Germany supporting a pro-Soviet policy.” Gehlen, Critchfield added, would like to “discuss a plan for such an eventuality” with his friend Dulles, “in great privacy.”
It is unlikely that Dulles was shocked by Gehlen’s proposal to reinstitute fascism in Germany, since CIA officials had long been discussing such authoritarian contingency plans with the Gehlen Organization and other right-wing elements in Germany. In 1952, West German police discovered that the CIA was supporting a two-thousand-member fascist youth group led by ex-Nazi officers who had their own alarming plans for terminating democracy. Police investigators revealed that the CIA-backed group had compiled a blacklist of people to be “liquidated” as “unreliable” in case of a conflict with the Soviet Union. Included on the list were not just West German Communists but leaders of the Social Democratic Party serving in the Bundestag, as well as other left-leaning government officials. There were cries of outrage in the German parliament over the revelations, but the State Department worked strenuously behind the scenes to suppress the story, and similar alarming measures continued to be quietly contemplated throughout the Cold War.
These authoritarian plans were part of a sweeping covert strategy developed in the earliest days of the Cold War by U.S. intelligence officials, including Dulles, to counter a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe by creating a “stay-behind network” of armed resisters to fight the Red Army. Code-named Operation Gladio, these secret CIA-funded networks attracted fascist and criminal elements, some of which later played subversive roles in West Germany, France, and Italy, disrupting democratic rule in those countries by staging terrorist acts and plotting coups and assassinations.
In the end, Gehlen didn’t feel the need to overthrow democracy in Bonn, but his organization did undertake a variety of secret activities over the years that seriously undermined democratic institutions in Germany. Backed by U.S. intelligence, Hitler’s former spymaster implemented wide-ranging surveillance of West German officials and citizens, including opening private mail and tapping phones. Gehlen defended the snooping as an internal security measure aimed at ferreting out Soviet and East German spies, but his net grew wider and wider until it was cast across an increasingly broad spectrum of the population, including opposition party leaders, labor union officials, journalists, and schoolteachers. Gehlen even used his spy apparatus to investigate survivors of the Valkyrie plot against Hitler, including Dulles’s wartime comrade Hans Gisevius, all of whom he suspected of being Soviet agents. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 11 Strange Love
Most undercover recruits in the spy trade were sketchy, undependable characters who were motivated by greed, blackmail, revenge, lust, or other less than honorable impulses. But the CIA’s spymasters dreamed of taking their craft to a new technological level, one that flirted with the imaginative extremes of science fiction. They wanted to create human machines who would act on command, even against their own conscience. Dulles was particularly keen on finding out if LSD could be used to program zombielike saboteurs or assassins. He kept grilling Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s top drug expert, asking him if the psychedelic compound could be used to make “selected individuals commit acts of substantial sabotage or acts of violence, including murder,” recalled the scientist.
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One of the CIA-sponsored researchers who worked on the Artichoke interrogations in Germany, a Harvard-trained physician named Henry Knowles Beecher, was brought to Camp King by the agency to advise on the best way to induce amnesia in Soviet spies after they had been subjected to the agency’s interrogation methods. Beecher, the chief of anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, was an outspoken proponent of the Nuremberg Code, which forbade medical experimentation on humans without their informed consent. But he was one of many prominent American doctors and scientists who lost their moral direction during the Cold War, enticed by the generous CIA patronage that featured virtually unlimited funding and unrestricted research parameters. Lured into a world where nearly everything was permitted in the name of national security, Beecher even began drawing on the work done by Nazi doctors at Dachau.
After reading a captured Gestapo report in 1947 that indicated that mescaline could be an effective interrogation tool, Beecher set off on a decadelong search for a magical “truth serum” that would compel prisoners to reveal all, a quest that later focused on LSD and would involve unwitting subjects in Germany as well as at his own Boston hospital. Urging the government to expand its research into LSD as an “offensive weapon,” Beecher subjected his involuntary subjects to severe overdoses of the hallucinogen, despite knowing that it caused “acute panic,” “paranoid reactions,” and other trauma in his victims—a “psychosis in miniature,” he coolly observed in one government report, that “offers interesting possibilities.”
Ever since the Nuremberg trials, international legal authorities had moved to formally condemn the physical and psychological abuse of the powerless. In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly emphatically stated in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The following year, the third Geneva Convention reiterated this fundamental commandment: “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.” But by defining the Cold War as a ruthless struggle outside the norms of military conduct and human decency, the national security regime shaped by men like Dulles was able to brazenly defy international law. Few of those involved in CIA brain warfare expressed any ethical concerns about their work. “I never gave a thought to legality or morality,” one agency case officer readily acknowledged after he retired. “Frankly, I did what worked.”
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Olson and Cournoyer had also collaborated on projects that made them less proud. After the war, they had traveled around the United States, supervising the spraying of biological agents from aircraft and crop dusters. Some of the tests, which were conducted in cities like San Francisco as well as rural areas in the Midwest, involved harmless chemicals, but others featured more dangerous toxins. In Alaska—where the two men sought to stage their experiments in an environment that resembled wintertime Russia—“we used a spore which is very similar [to] anthrax,” Cournoyer recalled. “So to that extent we did something that was not kosher.” One of their research colleagues, a bacteriologist named Dr. Harold Batchelor, learned aerial spray techniques from the infamous Dr. Kurt Blome, director of the Nazis’ biological warfare program. Years later, a congressional investigation found these open-air experiments conducted by Camp Detrick scientists “appalling.”
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In November 1953, before Frank Olson could change his life, he became one more unwitting victim of the CIA’s mind control program. A week before Thanksgiving, Olson and several other SO Division scientists were invited to a weekend retreat at a secluded CIA facility near Deep Creek Lake, a lushly forested resort area in western Maryland. The scientists were greeted by Sidney Gottlieb, the chief wizard of the CIA’s magic potion division, the Technical Services Staff. Gottlieb was one of the agency’s more unique characters, a stuttering, clubfooted biochemist whom friends described as a kind of untethered genius. Despite his infirmity, Gottlieb threw himself into such passionate, if unlikely, recreations as folk dancing and goat herding. The son of Orthodox Hungarian Jews, he rejected Judaism and spent his lifetime searching for his own form of enlightenment, experimenting with Zen Buddhism and becoming an early celebrant in the cult of LSD. Gottlieb devoted himself enthusiastically to the CIA’s mind-manipulation program, subjecting hundreds of unsuspecting Americans to experimental drugs. The CIA chemist preyed on “people who could not fight back,” as one agency official put it, such as seven patients in a federal drug hospital in Kentucky who were dosed with acid for seventy-seven straight days by a Gottlieb-funded doctor who ran the hospital’s addiction treatment program. Gottlieb also excelled at cooking up rare toxins and clever delivery mechanisms in his laboratory to eliminate people the CIA deemed political enemies. Gottlieb strongly adhered to the Dulles ethic that there were no rules in war. “We were in a World War II mode,” said a CIA psychologist who was close to Gottlieb. “The war never really ended for us.”
After dinner on the second night of the Deep Creek retreat, Gott-lieb’s deputy spiked a bottle of Cointreau and offered it to the unsuspecting Olson and his colleagues. It was the beginning of a nightmarish ordeal for Olson, which would end a week later when the scientist went crashing through the window of the tenth-floor hotel room in midtown Manhattan where he was being held by the CIA and plunged to his death. After being dosed at Deep Creek, Olson never seemed to recover; he remained anxious and confused throughout the week leading up to his fatal fall. The CIA officials who took charge of him that week later claimed they were planning to put him in psychiatric care. But instead they shuttled him around from place to place, taking him to a New York City allergist on the CIA payroll named Dr. Harold Abramson, who had conducted LSD tolerance experiments for the agency, and even to a magician named John Mulholland, who taught CIA agents how magic techniques could improve their spycraft. As the days went by, Olson became increasingly agitated, telling Dr. Abramson—not without reason—that the CIA was trying to poison him.
Shortly after Olson fell to his death from the Statler Hotel (now the Hotel Pennsylvania), someone placed a brief phone call from the scientist’s hotel room to Dr. Abramson. “Well, he’s gone,” said the caller. “Well, that’s too bad,” Abramson responded, and then the caller hung up.
Agents from the CIA’s Office of Security—the department made up of former FBI agents and cops that cleaned up the spy agency’s messes—quickly descended on the hotel, nudging aside New York police investigators. James McCord, later known for his role in the Watergate break-in, was one of the security agents who took charge of the Olson “investigation” for the CIA. The agency termed Olson’s death a suicide, the tragic end of an emotionally unstable man, and the case was buried for over two decades.
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Though Dulles himself rarely showed it, Sonny’s gravely reduced abilities wore down the family’s spirit too. Allen Jr. had been headed for a distinguished career in academia or public life, but now he had trouble finding his way home when he went out for lunch. Now and then, Sonny would stare at his father—and at Uncle Foster and Aunt Eleanor, too—with a look of such rage that it made Dulles shudder. He sometimes launched into angry denunciations of his father as a Hitler-lover and Nazi collaborator, outbursts that the family labeled "paranoid," but were close enough to the truth to unnerve the senior Dulles. "I don't know what we're going to do with him," Dulles began saying to Clover.
By 1954, Dulles turned in desperation to MKULTRA-sponsored doctors for help with Sonny. It is unclear whether Dulles paid for his son to be treated by these CIA-connected physicians, or whether their compensation came in the form of the generous agency research contracts that they received.
Among the first CIA-funded medical experts the spymaster enlisted to treat his son was the eminent Dr. Harold Wolff, chief of the neurology department at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center and former president of the American Neurology Association, who became one of the agency’s leading experts on mind control. Wolff was a sophisticated and cultured medical scientist with an international reputation for his research on migraine headaches, which he himself sometimes suffered. His global roster of patients included both the shah of Iran and the shah’s political nemesis, Prime Minister Mossadegh.
An intense and tightly wound man, Wolff set himself the goal of a new experiment every day. Dr. Donald Dalessio, who interned with the renowned neurologist and later worked with him as a research associate, remarked that Wolff’s “relentless drive for accomplishment epitomized the migraine personality that he so vividly documented in hundreds of patients.” He ordered his life around a “strict attention to the clock,” said Dalessio, “so that he was always on time, always prepared.” Trained by the renowned Russian father of behavior science, Ivan Pavlov, Wolff spent long hours in his sixth-floor laboratory at New York Hospital researching the mysteries of the brain. The lab was simple and “not cluttered with gear and impedimenta which characterize today’s [scientific facilities],” observed Dalessio, “for it was made to study people, not animals or molecules or other subunits, but functioning human beings.”
The wiry, balding neurologist brought an obsessive drive even to his recreational life, swimming every day at his athletic club, mountain climbing, and challenging his younger colleagues to slashing squash games on the rooftop court of his hospital—“an eerie place,” recalled Dalessio, “where the wind would shriek about the stone battlements.” The son of an artist, Wolff also married an artist, and he and his wife listened to classical music every day and visited a museum or art gallery every week.
Wolff was a supremely confident man. After his death, another migraine specialist commented that his career was marked by a “mixture of greatness and narrowness.” The narrowness came from “a desire to be on top and to win, and from an intellectual point of view, his dogmatism” and overcertainty about his medical theories. When Wolff was asked by a colleague why he had never bothered to be board-certified in neurology, he looked puzzled for a moment, and then replied, “But who would test me?” When Wolff was asked by the CIA to take a leading role in its MKULTRA program, he had no moral qualms. He himself would set the ethical boundaries of his mind control experimentation.
Wolff was sufficiently aware of the professional, and perhaps legal, pitfalls of the MKULTRA research to make sure that the CIA would assume responsibility for the most risky procedures. In a revealing passage in Wolff's CIA grant proposal, he wrote that his Cornell research team would test “potentially useful secret drugs (David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 2015 p.300-15)
Trujillo further ensured his control of the presidential palace by assiduously courting the powerful giant to the north, pledging his nation’s allegiance to the United States during World War II and the Cold War, and showering money on Washington politicians and lobbying firms. Trujillo’s courtship of Washington paid off. By 1955, John Foster Dulles’s State Department was celebrating the strongman as “one of the hemisphere’s foremost spokesmen against the Communist movement.” That same year, Vice President Nixon visited the Dominican Republic and made a public display of embracing Trujillo. The United States should overlook the notorious defects of the Dominican dictator, Nixon later advised Eisenhower’s cabinet, because, after all, “Spaniards had many talents, but government was not among them.”
Despite his enormous wealth, Trujillo himself was too thuggish a character to work his way into polite company, at home or abroad. But by the 1950s, his roguish social circle had produced several personalities smooth enough to be embraced by the international jet set, including his first daughter, the sexy bad girl, Flor de Oro, and the suave ladies’ man she was once married to and never got over, playboy-diplomat Porfirio Rubirosa. The leading symbol of Dominican masculinity on the world stage, Rubirosa started his career as a lowly military aide to Trujillo, parlaying his connections, good looks, and sartorial elegance into becoming one of the most celebrated Latin lovers of his day—“the Dominican Don Juan,” the “Caribbean Casanova,” as the international press anointed him.
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Galíndez’s life in New York, as a politically active refugee at the height of the Cold War, was a complex web. In addition to his activism against Trujillo, the scholar served as the U.S. representative of the Basque government-in-exile. Galíndez also maintained an ambiguous relationship with U.S. security officials. Galíndez’s escape to the United States in 1946 was no doubt made smoother by the fact that he had been secretly working as an informant for the FBI during the war, passing along information about suspicious pro-Nazi activity in the Caribbean. After he arrived in New York, the bureau asked him to spy on Communist-affiliated members of the anti-Franco resistance in the United States. In May 1951, the special agent in charge of the bureau’s New York office told FBI chief Hoover that Galíndez was “an invaluable informant,” whose reports were “extremely detailed, accurate and thorough.”
But FBI reports on Galíndez also noted that the Basque exile was strongly critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Eisenhower-Dulles era. He had been heard denouncing the administration for supporting the admission of Franco’s Spain to the United Nations, and for backing Latin dictators like Trujillo and Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza. In April 1955, Galíndez told an FBI informant in Miami that “since John Foster Dulles entered into the picture, the United States has started to write the blackest pages of its international relations. Never before in the history of the world has one single Government more effectively supported dictatorial powers in free nations.”
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But there had been many changes over the following year, as Castro moved to deliver on the promise of the revolution, nationalizing the sugar and oil industries, and beginning to transform Cuba from a vassal state of the United States to a sovereign nation. By early 1960, Dulles had resolved the debate within his intelligence agency over Castro’s true identity, deciding that he was a dedicated Communist and a serious threat to U.S. security. The CIA director’s hardening line mirrored that of friends in the business world like William Pawley, the globetrotting entrepreneur whose major investments in Cuban sugar plantations and Havana’s municipal transportation system were wiped out by Castro’s revolution. One of a coterie of vigorously anti-Communist international businessmen who provided the CIA with foreign information and contacts, as well as guns and money, Pawley began lobbying the Eisenhower administration to take an aggressive stand against Castro when he was still fighting Batista’s soldiers in the rugged peaks of the Sierra Maestra. After Fidel rode into Havana on a tank in January 1959, Pawley, who was gripped by what Eisenhower called a “pathological hatred for Castro,” even volunteered to pay for his assassination. As the Eisenhower administration took an increasingly belligerent posture toward the Castro regime, Pawley found himself at the center of the action, boasting that he was “in daily touch with Allen Dulles.”
The Eisenhower administration responded to Castro’s expropriation of American-owned plantations, factories, and utilities by cutting imports of Cuban sugar—the country’s economic lifeblood—and by launching a secret campaign aimed at sabotaging Castro’s government. In February 1960, mercenary pilots hired by the CIA dropped bombs on Cuban sugar mills, and in March, a French freighter loaded with Belgian weapons was blown up in the Havana harbor, killing dozens of sailors and stevedores. A second explosion killed many more, including firefighters and emergency medical workers, as they rushed to the scene. The same month, President Eisenhower approved a plan to train a paramilitary force outside of Cuba for a future invasion of the island. The operation, which was spearheaded by Vice President Nixon and the CIA, would culminate the following year on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs.
The explosion in Havana’s harbor was a milestone in the Cuban revolution. At a funeral ceremony the next day at Colon cemetery, an emotional Castro vowed that “Cuba will never become cowardly” in the face of U.S. aggression. He ended his oration with the declaration that became a ringing slogan of the Cuban revolution: Patrio o Muerte, Venceremos! (Motherland or Death, We Shall Win!) Determined that Cuba would not become another Guatemala, Castro turned to the Soviet Union for economic and military aid, and the tragic dance began, locking Cuba, the United States, and Russia in a fateful embrace for years to come, and nearly ending in a nuclear inferno.
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“Was it radical?” asked Castro, with the rhetorical skill he had mastered as a young lawyer, when his own life was on the line in Batista’s courtrooms. “It was not very radical. . . . We were not 150 percent communists at the time. We just appeared slightly pink. We were not confiscating lands. We simply proposed to pay for them in 20 years, and the only way we could afford to pay for them was by bonds—bonds which would mature in twenty years, at 4.5 percent interest, which would accumulate annually.” See, Castro was telling the world, revolutionary Cuba had been willing to play by capitalist rules. But this was not enough for Washington. Cuba’s new government “had been too bold. It had clashed with the international mining trusts, it had clashed with the interests of United Fruit Company, and it had clashed with the most powerful interests of the United States. So then the example shown by the Cuban revolution had to receive its punishment. Punitive actions of every type—even the destruction of Cuba’s foolhardy people—had to be carried out against the audacity of the revolutionary government.”
Journalist I. F. Stone pronounced Castro’s oration—which he delivered, hour after hour, by consulting just a single page of notes—a “tour de force.” It was unlike anything ever heard before in the United Nations: a scholarly, eloquent, and heartfelt broadside against the arrogance of imperial power, delivered in the capital of world finance, by a charismatic rebel leader who had risked his life to challenge that power. If Allen Dulles’s imperial guard still had any doubts about how serious a threat Fidel Castro represented, his dramatic performance at the UN that day thoroughly dispelled them.
The CIA knew how seductive Fidel’s appeal was—even in the West, particularly among college students, intellectuals, and artists. In April 1960, Robert Taber—the first African American reporter for CBS News, who had scored an exclusive interview with Castro when he was still fighting in the mountains—stirred liberal circles by purchasing a full-page ad in The New York Times that passionately endorsed the Cuban revolution. The appeal was signed by an impressive list of literary names—including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and Truman Capote—and sparked a wave of popular interest in the Cuban cause that led to the formation of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). Within six months, the committee had enrolled seven thousand members in twenty-seven “adult chapters” across the country and had struck a chord on college campuses, where forty student councils were formed.
While Castro was staying at the Theresa, the FPCC organized a party in his honor in the hotel’s shabby ballroom. Among the guests were Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and C. Wright Mills, whose own impassioned defense of the Cuban revolution, Listen, Yankee, had sold four hundred thousand copies within months. Mills’s book was based on his brief tour of the island, including three eighteen-hour days in the indefatigable company of Fidel, a man who, in the words of his friend Gabriel García Márquez, was “addicted to the habit of conversation . . . he rests by talking.”
These were the early, honeymoon days of the revolution, before Castro’s caudillo tendencies had hardened, and before the Soviet “partnership” with Cuba had become its own kind of colonialism. The relentless U.S. pressure on the island would never succeed in toppling Castro, but it would help turn his nation into the tropical police state that CIA propagandists insisted it was from the very beginning, amounting to a victory of sorts for Washington hard-liners.
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As Castro prepared to return home at the end of his tumultuous week in New York, he gave a spirited press conference at the airport. Why was the Cuban delegation departing on a Soviet jet, a reporter shouted? Because the United States had impounded all of Cuba’s airliners as a result of claims against his government, he responded. “What do you want us to do?” Castro asked plaintively. “You leave us without petroleum—Khrushchev gives us petroleum. You [cut] our sugar [imports]—Khrushchev buys our sugar. . . . You take away our planes—Khrushchev gives us his plane.”
The CIA knew what it wanted Castro to do. Shortly after the Cuban leader arrived home in Havana, as he addressed a teeming crowd from the balcony of the Presidential Palace, a bomb went off in the park behind the palace, followed by a second explosion within the hour. Later in the day, a third bomb—more powerful than the other two—rocked Havana. The CIA-sponsored terror campaign aimed at killing Castro and destroying his government was quickly escalating.
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In truth, Kennedy was keenly aware of Cuba’s colonial history and was outspokenly critical of how U.S. business interests had despoiled the country. In the same campaign speech in which he attacked Castro as a “dangerous enemy on our very doorstep,” JFK ripped into America’s corporate plunder and political domination of the island in surprisingly unvarnished terms. He also denounced Washington’s shameful practice of “propping up dictators throughout Latin America,” including the “bloody and repressive” Batista.
Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric on Cuba revealed a man who was painstakingly trying to work out the correct position for himself—and his country—on the revolutionary convulsions that were shaking the world. He did not want to appear naïve about Communist exploitation of these national liberation movements. But he was even more concerned that the United States be on the right side of history, by supporting the aspirations of the peoples of Latin America, Africa, and Asia as they threw off their colonial shackles.
On that brisk fall day outside the Hotel Theresa, where Kennedy was joined on the platform by a formidable supporting cast of Democratic dignitaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Congressman Powell, the presidential contender sounded more like a supporter of the bearded revolutionary in whose wake he was following than an enemy. “I am happy to come to this hotel, a little late, but I am happy to come here,” he began, to loud applause from the crowd. “Behind the fact of Castro coming to this hotel, Khrushchev coming to Castro, there is another great traveler in the world, and that is the travel of a world revolution, a world in turmoil. I am delighted to come to Harlem and I think the whole world should come here and the whole world should recognize that we all live right next to each other, whether here in Harlem or on the other side of the globe. We should be glad [that Castro and Khrushchev] came to the United States. We should not fear the twentieth century, for the worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American revolution.”
The man who was soon to become America’s youngest elected president showed Harlem that day that he, too, could deliver a speech—perhaps with less fire than Castro, but with equal passion and vision, and a bit more wit. Declaring that America’s revolutionary ideals continued to inspire people throughout the world, Kennedy said, “There are children in Africa called George Washington. There are children in Africa called Thomas Jefferson. There are none called Lenin or Trotsky or Stalin in the Congo . . . or Nixon. There may be a couple called Adam Powell,” he added, to loud laughter from the audience, which was well aware of the congressman’s reputation for womanizing.
America could not continue to inspire the world, Kennedy went on, unless it “practiced what it preaches” at home. “If a Negro baby is born here and a white baby is born next door, the Negro baby’s chance of finishing high school is about 60 percent of the white baby. This baby’s chance of getting through college is about a third of that baby’s. His chance of being unemployed is four times that baby’s.” All that must change, JFK told the audience. “White people are a minority in the world,” he said. They could no longer hold back the dreams of the rest of the world. Kennedy vowed that if he were elected, he would align America with the winds of change. “I believe it is important that the president of the United States personify the ideals of our society, speak out on this, associate ourselves with the great fight for equality.”
In the next three years, as Cuba became the flaming focal point of U.S. foreign policy, Kennedy would continue to wrestle with his relationship to Castro and the revolutionary change that he represented. As president, JFK’s posture on Cuba gradually softened, with the White House inching awkwardly toward a state of peaceful coexistence with the neighbor whom Kennedy once called “dangerous.” The fitful process of rapprochement with Cuba would set off a turbulent reaction in Washington, particularly within the national security circles still dominated by Dulles hard-liners. In these men’s minds, it was not just Havana that loomed as a hotbed of dangerous ideas, it was the Kennedy White House. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 13 Dangerous Ideas
In July 1957, Kennedy once more took a strong stand against French colonialism, this time France’s bloody war against Algeria’s independence movement, which again found the Eisenhower administration on the wrong side of history. Rising on the Senate floor, two days before America’s Independence Day, Kennedy declared,
The most powerful single force in the world today is neither communism nor capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile—it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent. The great enemy of that tremendous force of freedom is called, for want of a more precise term, imperialism—and today that means Soviet imperialism and, whether we like it or not, and though they are not to be equated, Western imperialism. Thus, the single most important test of American foreign policy today is how we meet the challenge of imperialism, what we do to further man’s desire to be free. On this test more than any other, this nation shall be critically judged by the uncommitted millions in Asia and Africa, and anxiously watched by the still hopeful lovers of freedom behind the Iron Curtain. If we fail to meet the challenge of either Soviet or Western imperialism, then no amount of foreign aid, no aggrandizement of armaments, no new pacts or doctrines or high-level conferences can prevent further setbacks to our course and to our security.
Kennedy’s speech was a bold challenge to the Eisenhower-Dulles worldview, which interpreted all international events through the prism of the Cold War, and allowed no space for developing nations to pursue their own path to progress. Breaking from the Cold War orthodoxy that prevailed in the Democratic as well as Republican parties, JFK suggested that Soviet expansionism was not the only enemy of world freedom; so, too, were the forces of Western imperialism that crushed the legitimate aspirations of people throughout the Third World.
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Corporate executives with major stakes in Africa were able to mingle and confer with U.S. national security officials at prestigious organizations like the Manhattan-based Africa-America Institute. The institute, which Harold Hochschild helped launch in 1953, sponsored the American education of future generations of African leaders, a goal the CIA found strategically valuable enough to help fund the group. Years later, after the Africa-America Institute was exposed as a CIA front, Hochschild appeared chagrinned when the subject came up with his son, Adam. The younger Hochschild cofounded Mother Jones magazine and later authored King Leopold’s Ghost, a powerful indictment of the Belgian reign of terror in the Congo. After the CIA ties to the institute were exposed, Hochschild fils later recalled, “[Father] seemed uncomfortable. He defended the link, saying that in its early years there was nowhere else the institute could have gotten enough money for its work. But he was clearly embarrassed that the whole thing had to be kept secret.”
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Doug Dillon strongly backed Dulles’s distraught view of Lumumba as a Soviet accomplice. It was an alarmist view calculated to convince Eisenhower that the African leader had to be terminated. As it turned out, the president required little persuasion. By the summer of 1960, Ike was sick, tired, and cranky—and he had little patience or understanding for Third World freedom struggles. Conferring with the British foreign minister Lord Home, Eisenhower quipped that he hoped “Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles.” At an NSC meeting in August 1960, Eisenhower gave Dulles direct approval to “eliminate” Lumumba. Robert Johnson, the minutes taker at the NSC meeting, later recalled the shock felt in the room: “There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued.” Johnson said there was nothing ambiguous about Eisenhower’s lethal order. “I was surprised that I would ever hear a president say anything like this in my presence or the presence of a group of people. I was startled.”
Over the next several months, the CIA, working with its allies in Belgian intelligence, engineered a military coup led by a cocky, ruthless, twenty-nine-year-old colonel named Joseph Mobutu that forced Lumumba out of office and placed him under house arrest. But that was not enough for the CIA. Lumumba “would remain a grave danger,” Dulles told an NSC meeting on September 21, 1960, “as long as he was not yet disposed of.” Three days later, Dulles made it clear that he wanted Lumumba permanently removed, cabling the CIA’s Leopoldville station, “We wish give [sic] every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position.”
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In his final letter to his wife, Patrice Lumumba vowed, “Neither brutality, nor cruelty nor torture will ever bring me to ask for mercy, for I prefer to die with my head unbowed.” It was an oath that Lumumba had kept throughout his ordeal. Lumumba also told his wife, “History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations. . . . Africa will write its own history, and to the north and south of the Sahara, it will be a glorious and dignified history.”
This promise did not come true for the Congo. The mourners at Lumumba’s wake knew how profound a loss it was, and what it meant for their nation. “There is nothing for us to do now,” muttered Lumumba’s brother-in-law. “He is gone. There is no one to take his place.” David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 14 The Torch Is Passed
Perhaps the most devastating revelation about the CIA operation emerged years later, in 2005, when the agency was compelled to release the minutes of a meeting held by its Cuba task force on November 15, 1960, one week after Kennedy’s election. The group, which was deliberating on how to brief the president-elect on the pending invasion, came to an eye-opening conclusion. In the face of strong security measures that Castro had implemented, the CIA task force admitted, their invasion plan was “now seen to be unachievable, except as a joint [CIA/Department of Defense] action.” In other words, the CIA realized that its Bay of Pigs expedition was doomed to fail unless its exile brigade was reinforced by the power of the U.S. military. But the CIA never shared this sobering assessment with the president.
Nor did Dulles and Bissell share with Kennedy their other “magic bullet” for success in Cuba—the agency’s ongoing plot with the Mafia to assassinate Castro, which had been authorized by Eisenhower. With Cuba’s revolutionary government decapitated, CIA officials were certain that the regime would soon topple. But the Cuban leader had learned from the annals of imperial history and had wisely taken precautions against such plots. He would thwart his enemies for decades to come, as he grew from a young firebrand to a gray-bearded legend.
Dulles and Bissell knew that Kennedy was deeply torn over the Cuba invasion plan. His denunciations of Western imperialism had raised high hopes throughout the hemisphere that the days of heavy-handed Yanqui interference were coming to an end. “Kennedy’s election has given rise to an enormous expectancy throughout Latin America,” Schlesinger noted in his journal in early February 1961. “They see him as another FDR; they expect great things from him.” But Kennedy had also campaigned for a strong, though undefined, response to Castro. Eisenhower’s final words of advice to him were to take out the Cuban leader—and he left behind an invasion plan and assassination plot to do just that. As William Bundy observed, the old general had handed Kennedy “a grenade with the pin pulled”—if he didn’t use it, it could blow up in his face, with serious political consequences.
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Around midnight on Tuesday, April 18, in the midst of the unfolding fiasco, some of the principal advocates for a bigger war in Cuba made one final assault on Kennedy, gathering with him in the Oval Office after the annual congressional party in the East Room. Among those pressing the case for escalation were Bissell and two longtime Pentagon allies of Dulles, Joint Chiefs chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and Navy chief Arleigh Burke. Dulles was absent, still keeping his distance from the mess and hoping that Bissell would take the fall for it. The CIA director was placing his confidence in Lemnitzer and Burke, hoping that the two blunt-spoken, highly decorated warriors could strong-arm Kennedy into unleashing the U.S. military. The president was still in formal white-tie-and-black-tails attire from the East Room party, and the military men were in their full dress uniforms. But there was nothing polite or decorative about the intense discussion in the president’s office.
Admiral Burke was especially gruff with Kennedy, treating him as if he were a weak-kneed ensign. Without informing the president, Burke had already taken the liberty of positioning two battalions of Marines on Navy destroyers off the coast of Cuba, “anticipating that U.S. forces might be ordered into Cuba to salvage a botched invasion.” It was one of many extraordinary acts of Pentagon and CIA insubordination that plagued the Kennedy presidency from the very beginning. Now the Navy chief was browbeating Kennedy into taking the first steps toward a full-scale war with Castro.
“Let me take two jets and shoot down the enemy aircraft,” growled “31-Knot” Burke, who had become legendary for his speed and daring as a destroyer squadron commander in the South Pacific during the war, while JFK was a mere PT boat captain. But by this point in the unfolding disaster, Kennedy was not inclined to take any more advice from his national security wise men, even if they were World War II idols. “What if Castro’s forces return fire and hit the destroyer?” Kennedy sensibly asked.
“Then we’ll knock the hell out of them!” Burke bellowed.
Now Kennedy began to show some of his own icy, if more restrained, temper. He had made it clear all along that he did not want the Bay of Pigs to blow up into an international crisis with the United States in the middle—and here was his Navy chief urging just such a course of action. “Burke, I don’t want the United States involved in this,” he firmly repeated one more time.
“Hell, Mr. President,” the admiral shot back, “but we are involved!”
But Kennedy stood his ground. As he had repeatedly warned them, there would be no air strikes, no Marine landings—and the fate of the Bay of Pigs operation was sealed.
“They were sure I’d give in to them,” Kennedy later told Dave Powers. “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well they had me figured all wrong.”
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Dulles’s spin on the Bay of Pigs began appearing in the press as soon as the smoke cleared from the invasion. His version received prominent play in a September 1961 Fortune magazine article titled “Cuba: The Record Set Straight.” The article was written byFortune staff writer Charles Murphy, a journalist so close to Dulles that the spymaster used him as a ghostwriter. The previous year, Murphy had fawningly agreed to write a Dulles memoir, telling the CIA chief “you have honored me with your invitation to me to lend a hand with your book, and I am looking forward to the association.” Much of Murphy’s article in Fortune sounded like it was dictated directly by Dulles, shifting blame from the CIA to the White House. Murphy later claimed that Admiral Burke had been his source, but the Kennedy brothers suspected that Dulles’s deputy, General Charles Cabell, was also involved.
Kennedy was furious about the Fortune article, and he had the White House prepare a point-by-point rebuttal for publisher Henry Luce. The media-savvy president knew that he was confronting a formidable opponent in the war of ideas over Cuba. At his first press conference following the Bay of Pigs, JFK put the Washington press corps on alert, telling reporters, “I wouldn’t be surprised if information wasn’t poured into you” from “interested agencies.”
If the president could not match Dulles’s wide network of media assets, he brought his own impressive skills to the public relations war with the CIA. Kennedy was adept at massaging influential journalists like New York Times Washington columnist James “Scotty” Reston. While the Bay of Pigs disaster was still unfolding, JFK invited Reston to lunch at the White House, confiding to him, “I probably made a mistake in keeping Allen Dulles on. . . . I have never worked with him and therefore I can’t estimate his meaning when he tells me things. . . . Dulles is a legendary figure, and it’s hard to operate with legendary figures. . . . It’s a hell of a way to learn things, but I have learned one thing from this business—that is, that we will have to deal with the CIA.”
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News that the coup was being led by the widely admired Maurice Challe, a former air force chief and commander of French forces in Algeria, stunned the government in Paris, from de Gaulle down. Challe, a squat, quiet man, was a World War II hero and, so it had seemed, a loyal Gaullist. But the savage passions of the war in Algeria had deeply affected Challe and left him vulnerable to the persuasions of more zealous French officers. He had promised Algeria’s French settlers and pro-French Muslims that they would not be abandoned, and he felt a soldierly responsibility to stand by his oath, as well as by the memory of the French servicemen who had lost their lives in the war. In his radio broadcast to the people of France, the coup leader explained that he was taking his stand against de Gaulle’s “government of capitulation . . . so that our dead shall not have died for nothing.”
De Gaulle quickly concluded that Challe must be acting with the support of U.S. intelligence, and Élysée officials began spreading this word to the press. Shortly before his resignation from the French military, Challe had served as NATO commander in chief, and he had developed close relations with a number of high-ranking U.S. officers stationed in the military alliance’s Fontainebleau headquarters. Challe and American security officials shared a deep disaffection with de Gaulle. The stubborn, seventy-year-old pillar of French nationalism was viewed as a growing obstacle to U.S. ambitions for NATO because he refused to incorporate French troops under allied command and insisted on building a separate nuclear force beyond Washington’s control. De Gaulle’s enemies in Paris and Washington were also convinced that the French president’s awkward steps toward granting Algerian independence threatened to create a “Soviet base” in strategic, oil-rich North Africa.
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But The New York Times’s Scotty Reston was more aligned with the sentiments of the Kennedy White House. Echoing the charges circulating in the French press, Reston reported that the CIA was indeed “involved in an embarrassing liaison with the anti-Gaullist officers.” Reston communicated the rising fury in JFK’s inner circle over the CIA’s rogue behavior, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the French escapade: “All this has increased the feeling in the White House that the CIA has gone beyond the bounds of an objective intelligence-gathering agency and has become the advocate of men and policies that have embarrassed the Administration.”
Allen Dulles was once again making his own policy, this time in France. There was a long history of acrimony between Dulles and de Gaulle, dating back to World War II and the complex internal politics of the French Resistance. As OSS chief in Switzerland, Dulles favored a far right faction of the Resistance that was opposed to de Gaulle. In his war memoirs, de Gaulle accused Dulles of being part of “a scheme” that was determined to “silence or set aside” the French general. Pierre de Bénouville, a right-wing Resistance leader on Dulles’s OSS payroll, was later accused of betraying Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s dashing representative in the French underground, to the Gestapo. After he was captured, Moulin was subjected to brutal torture before being beaten to death—by the notorious war criminal Klaus Barbie, according to some accounts.
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JFK took pains to assure Paris that he strongly supported de Gaulle’s presidency, phoning Hervé Alphand, the French ambassador in Washington, to directly communicate these assurances. But, according to Alphand, Kennedy’s disavowal of official U.S. involvement in the coup came with a disturbing addendum—the American president could not vouch for his own intelligence agency. Kennedy told Alphand that “the CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely maneuvers might be true.”
This admission of presidential impotence, which Alphand reported to Paris, was a startling moment in U.S. foreign relations, though it remains largely unknown today. Kennedy then underlined how deeply estranged he was from his own security machinery by taking the extraordinary step of asking Alphand for the French government’s help to track down the U.S. officials behind the coup, promising to fully punish them. “[Kennedy] would be quite ready to take all necessary measures in the interest of good Franco-American relations, whatever the rank or functions of [the] incriminated people,” Alphand cabled French foreign minister Maurice Couve de Murville.
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Shortly after pushing out Grossin, de Gaulle also jettisoned his security adviser, Constantin Melnik, Dulles’s close ally. Late into his life, Melnik continued to insist that the CIA was always a friend to de Gaulle—which would have come as a surprise to the French president. Writing in his 1999 memoir, Politically Incorrect, Melnik flatly declared, “I can testify that . . . despite suspicious yelping by Gaullist camp followers . . . the CIA always was a faithful ally of General de Gaulle, even of his often torturous Algerian policies.” After de Gaulle dumped Melnik, Dulles—who by then had also been fired—immediately offered to hire him for a new private intelligence agency he was planning in the Third World. But Melnik declined, instead pursuing a career in French publishing and politics.
For the rest of his ten-year presidency, which ended with his retirement from politics in 1969, de Gaulle continued to take strong countermeasures against forces he regarded as seditious threats. In 1962, he expelled CIA station chief Alfred Ulmer, a gung ho veteran of Dulles’s Cold War battlegrounds. In 1967, de Gaulle evicted NATO from France to regain “full sovereignty [over] French territory” after discovering that the military alliance was encouraging Western European secret services to interfere in France’s domestic politics.
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The summer following the Bay of Pigs, Prescott Bush—the CIA’s man in the Senate—and his wife, Dorothy, invited Dulles to dinner at their Washington home. The spymaster showed up with John McCone in tow—the Republican businessman and former Atomic Energy Commission chairman Kennedy had just privately tapped as Dulles’s replacement. Bush, who was still unaware that Dulles had been officially deposed, was surprised to see McCone, “whom,” he later recalled in a letter to Clover, “we had not thought of as a particular friend of Allen’s. But Allen broke the ice promptly, and said that he wanted us to meet his successor. The announcement came the next day.” The dinner conversation around the Bush family table that night was awkward. “We tried to make a pleasant evening of it,” Bush wrote, “but I was rather sick at heart, and angry too, for it was the Kennedy’s [sic] that brot [sic] about the fiasco. And here they were making Allen seem to be the goat, which he wasn’t and did not deserve. I have never forgiven them.” David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 15 Contempt
Schlesinger had his differences with the CIA crowd, going back to his OSS days. He had been offended by “the notion of American spooks” like Dulles and Wisner “cheerfully consorting with people like General Reinhard Gehlen. . . . There was something aesthetically displeasing about Americans plotting with Nazis, who had recently been killing us, against Russians, whose sacrifices had made the allied victory possible.” During the Eisenhower-Dulles years, Schlesinger found much more that was “aesthetically displeasing” about the Republican reign. “The Dulles brothers,” sniffed Schlesinger’s first wife, Marian, years later, “were self-righteous and egomaniacal.” By the time Kennedy took office, Marian Schlesinger, a product of the same Cambridge background as her husband, regarded Allen Dulles as “passé.”
But in the name of Cold War fraternity, Schlesinger was willing to make his own political compromises—even with men like Allen Dulles, whose Wall Street Republicanism and bullying foreign interventionism represented everything the historian opposed. Schlesinger made an effort to maintain cordial relations with the CIA chief, keeping up a friendly correspondence with Dulles that lasted late into the Old Man’s life. Schlesinger wrote a favorable review of Germany’s Underground, Dulles’s 1947 book on anti-Hitler wartime intrigues, which elicited a warm thank-you note from the spook. Over dinner at Phil Graham’s house in March 1958, they discussed Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s epic lament about the fragility of love and the human spirit in the grinding machinery of twentieth-century Russian history. CIA officials believed that the novel, which had been banned in the USSR, had “great propaganda value,” and they were planning to sneak copies into Pasternak’s homeland, though the author himself came to regret the political exploitation of his book.
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If Kennedy thought that he was getting, in McCone, a respectable Republican front man who would readily do his bidding at the CIA, he was sorely disappointed. In May 1962, Schlesinger fell into conversation at a French embassy party with his friend, banker-diplomat W. Averell Harriman, the old Democratic Party wise man who had served as FDR’s ambassador to Moscow and was now serving JFK as a globe-trotting ambassador at large. Harriman gave Schlesinger an astringent evaluation of the new McCone regime, which he saw as little changed from the Dulles days. This was clear, Harriman confided, from looking at the policy maneuvers around Laos, the Southeast Asia sideshow in which Kennedy was determined not to get embroiled. JFK’s policy of neutrality was being “systematically sabotaged by the military and the CIA,” Harriman warned. “McCone and the people in the CIA want the president to have a setback. They want to justify the [intervention] position CIA took five years ago. They want to prove that a neutral solution is impossible and that the only course is to turn Laos into an American bastion.”
Harriman, a veteran of Washington infighting, then advised Schlesinger how the White House should handle the CIA and military seditionists in its midst. “General [George] Marshall once told me that, when you change a policy, you must change the men too. [The] CIA has the same men—on the desk and in the field—who were responsible for the disasters of the past, and naturally they do things to prove they were right. Every big thing the CIA has tried in the Far East has been catastrophic . . . and the men responsible for these catastrophes are still there.” Kennedy’s purge of the CIA, Harriman made clear, had not been sweeping enough.
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But just four days after the Kennedy-engineered steel pact was signed, U.S. Steel chairman Roger Blough scheduled a meeting at the White House and stunned the president by informing him that he was going to announce a 3.5 percent price increase, effective at midnight—a move that would trigger price jumps at other steel companies and send inflationary ripples throughout the economy.
Kennedy was furious at Blough’s double cross, which he correctly saw as a direct challenge to his ability to manage the economy. “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches,” said JFK at the height of the steel industry crisis, “but I never believed it until now”—a remark that he was happy to have leaked to Newsweek.
While the president saw Blough as a backstabber, Luce’s Fortune magazine regarded the steel mogul as a capitalist hero, declaring him a “business statesman” who was fighting not just for his own company but on behalf of the entire corporate sector by defying the president’s authority. Blough’s company occupied a central position in the country’s corporate pantheon, which was reflected in the U.S. Steel board of directors. Blough himself was well connected within the power elite—including to Dulles, with whom he served in organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Lafayette Fellowship Foundation (part of the Ford Foundation).
Kennedy understood that if Blough and the other colluding steel executives prevailed, his leadership would be severely undermined, not only at home but abroad. He had staked his reputation with organized labor and American consumers on the deal—and now he was faced with “the most painfully embarrassing predicament of his career,” in the view of his White House advisers. A steel industry victory would make it clear to the entire world who ran America.
Determined to protect his presidency, over the next three days JFK unleashed the full powers of the federal government in an all-out effort to crush the steel industry rebellion. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy announced a grand jury probe of steel price-fixing, which he followed by issuing subpoenas for the personal and corporate records of steel executives and by sending FBI agents to raid their offices. “We were going to go for broke: their expense accounts and where they’d been and what they were doing,” JFK’s brother and political enforcer later recalled. “I picked up all their records and I told the FBI to interview them all—march into their offices the next day. We weren’t going to go slowly. . . . All of [the steel executives] were hit with meetings the next morning by agents.” Meanwhile, Robert McNamara’s Defense Department announced that it was reviewing its steel purchasing practices, making it clear that it would favor companies that did not follow U.S. Steel’s price hike.
Kennedy’s strong-arm tactics produced quick results. On April 12, Inland Steel—a smaller but still significant company—caved under the pressure, announcing that it would not raise prices. Bethlehem Steel soon followed, and by the next day U.S. Steel itself waved the white flag.
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Kennedy achieved the compromise by agreeing to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey, which the Soviet Union found equally menacing. In fact, the president had been trying to get the obsolete Jupiter missiles demobilized for over a year but had been stymied by State Department foot-dragging—just one more example of the intransigence and insubordination that bedeviled his administration. JFK was furious when he learned that his original order to remove the Jupiter rockets from Turkey had been ignored. “The President believed he was President, and that, his wishes having been made clear, they would be followed and the missiles removed,” Bobby Kennedy later wrote in Thirteen Days, his memoir about the missile crisis. The President believed he was President . . . it was a striking turn of phrase, one that captured JFK’s uncertain grasp on the wheel of power.
The searing experience of teetering on the nuclear edge had the effect of creating a survivors’ bond between Kennedy and Khrushchev. JFK came to respect the Soviet leader’s earthy wisdom and his surprising eloquence on behalf of peace. “At the climax of events around Cuba, there began to be a smell of burning in the air,” Khrushchev evocatively began a speech he gave a few weeks after the missile crisis, in which he denounced the “militarists” who had sought a nuclear confrontation. Kennedy read aloud part of the speech to Schlesinger, adding, “Khrushchev certainly has some good writers!”
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Dulles’s old friend, Bill Pawley, the right-wing Miami entrepreneur who had long collaborated on secret CIA missions, was also warned about his involvement in the exile raids. But he remained defiant, hatching a plot so ambitious that he claimed it would bring down Kennedy himself. In April, Pawley wrote a long letter to his political comrade, Dick Nixon, declaring, “All of the Cubans and most Americans in this part of the country believe that to remove Castro, you must first remove Kennedy, and that is not going to be easy.” Pawley’s plan was to assemble a rogue’s crew of Mafia hit men and Cuban desperadoes and to set sail on his sixty-five-foot yacht, the Flying Tiger II, for the waters off Cuba, accompanied by a reporter and photographer from Life magazine to document the daring mission. Once ashore in Cuba, the raiders were to rendezvous with two Soviet military officers based on the island who wanted to defect, bringing them back to the United States with explosive evidence that Khrushchev had double-crossed Kennedy and had never withdrawn his missiles. The mission went nowhere: there were no missiles or Soviet defectors, and the raiders themselves disappeared, presumably into the jaws of Castro’s security forces.
Years later, two of the mercenaries who had slithered through Miami’s anti-Castro underworld in the early 1960s claimed that the Pawley raid had really been a cover for yet another CIA-Mafia assassination attempt on Castro. The plotting against the Cuban leader continued to flourish, even after the CIA assured the Kennedy administration that it had terminated its alliance with the Mafia. Two emissaries from the CIA informed Bobby Kennedy of the assassination plots at a meeting in his Justice Department office in May 1962. The attorney general, who had built his law enforcement reputation as an aggressive mob hunter, listened to the CIA men with barely contained fury. “I trust that if you ever do business with organized crime again—with gangsters—you will let the attorney general know,” he said with icy sarcasm. The CIA officials assured Bobby that the Eisenhower-approved plots had been shut down—but, in truth, they would continue, without the Kennedys’ knowledge, throughout their administration and for many years after.
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In October 1963, Dulles went public with his most direct criticism of the Kennedy administration in a militant address that he titled “The Art of Persuasion: America’s Role in the Ideological Struggle.” In it, Dulles ridiculed the administration’s “yearning to be ‘loved’ by the rest of the world. . . . No country that wishes to be really popular should aspire to or accept the role of leadership.” The United States was “too rich and too powerful” to be loved, Dulles declared—and that’s the way it must remain.
“I should much prefer to have people respect us than to try to make them love us,” he continued. “They should realize that we propose to remain strong economically and militarily, that we have firm principles and a steady foreign policy and will not compromise with communism or appease it.” Here it was, at last, Dulles’s critique of the Kennedy presidency, in stark relief. JFK was an appeaser, a weak leader who wanted to be loved by our friends and enemies, when the man in the White House should be feared and respected.
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Law enforcement agencies began tracking Sierra as he pursued his shady agenda, but in June the FBI terminated its investigation after concluding that he was involved in nothing more than a “con job.” The Chicago office of the Secret Service, however, suspected that Sierra was a more sinister figure. By November 1963, Chicago—like Miami, New Orleans, and Dallas—had become a nest of anti-Kennedy intrigue. On November 2, local Secret Service officials foiled a well-organized assassination plot against President Kennedy. After landing at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport that day, Kennedy was scheduled to ride in a motorcade to Soldier Field for the annual Army-Navy football game. But the motorcade was canceled after the Secret Service exposed a plot to ambush the president from a tall warehouse building as his limousine slowed for a hairpin turn. The plot, which involved a sniper team composed of a disgruntled ex-marine who worked in the building and at least two Cuban marksmen, bore a disturbing resemblance to the series of events that would claim Kennedy’s life twenty days later in Dallas. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 16 Rome on the Potomac
In a far corner of the garden, a low wooden platform bathed in spotlights had been set up for the president to hold private audiences with Italy’s dignitaries. The longest conversation that Kennedy held that evening was with the old Socialist warrior, Pietro Nenni. As the two men huddled together on the little stage, their faces nearly touching, they were a study in contrasts: Kennedy tall, youthful, and glamorous; Nenni, diminutive, bespectacled, and balding. But Nenni clearly felt he had found a political soul mate in Kennedy. The previous year, Nenni had tweaked the U.S. foreign policy establishment with an essay in Foreign Affairs, in which he defended his party’s neutralist stand in the Cold War and attacked Western imperialism, charging U.S. and European governments with backing “Fascist-type dictatorships” in the Third World. “They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in shoring up rotten situations doomed in any case to crumble,” wrote the Italian. “They have opened doors to Communists instead of supporting democratic and socialist forces that would be capable of directing the impulse to freedom of the colonial peoples.” Now, as a long line of other Italian politicians waited impatiently to speak with Kennedy, Nenni was engaged in rapt conversation with an American president who had voiced the same sentiments.
When his audience with Kennedy finally came to an end, Nenni was “absolutely enraptured and happy as he could be,” according to a U.S. embassy official who was there. Stepping off the platform, the old man wrapped his arms around his wife and murmured something into her ear. As they walked away, Nenni wiped tears from his eyes. Later, Nenni’s wife told a group of American diplomats attending the Quirinale event that her husband had been “enchanted” by JFK. The Socialist leader was convinced that his political dream was about to come true: after years of determined U.S. resistance, Italy’s democratic left was at last to become part of the government.
The president, too, thought his trip to Rome was a “considerable success,” telling Schlesinger on his return to Washington that he had a “good talk” with Nenni and adding, “So far as I could see, everyone in Italy is for an opening to the left.”
But Allen Dulles and his old cohorts in the CIA’s Rome station did not share the president’s enthusiasm for the Italian political developments, and they boldly communicated their dissent to Christian Democratic officials. This is a remarkable and, until now, unreported story, one that sheds new light on the growing fissures in the Kennedy administration. Shortly after JFK flew home from Italy, Dino John Pionzio, the CIA’s leading operator in Italy at the time, huddled with Sereno Freato, the administrative secretary of Aldo Moro—a rising star in the Christian Democratic Party who would soon become Italy’s prime minister. Pionzio, a Skull and Bones member at Yale (Class of 1950) and zealous Cold Warrior, was adamantly opposed to the opening to the left. The CIA man wanted to know what Moro had discussed with Kennedy a few days earlier during an afternoon stroll that JFK and the Italian politician had taken through the Quirinale garden. To his great dismay, Pionzio was told that Moro and Kennedy had agreed the apertura should go forward.
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But Wyatt continued to be haunted by Harvey and the Kennedy assassination late into his life. In 1998, when a French investigative journalist named Fabrizio Calvi came to interview Wyatt about Operation Gladio at his retirement home on California’s Lake Tahoe, the former CIA official felt compelled to raise the subject, out of the blue, as Calvi was leaving. “As he was walking me out to my car, Wyatt suddenly said, ‘You know, I always wondered what Bill Harvey was doing in Dallas in November 1963,’” Calvi recently recalled. “Excuse me?” said the stunned French journalist, who realized that Harvey’s presence in Dallas that month was extremely noteworthy.
Wyatt explained that he had bumped into Harvey on a plane to Dallas sometime before the assassination, and when he asked his boss why he was going there, Harvey answered vaguely, saying something like, “I’m here to see what’s happening.”
When Calvi tried to pursue the conversation, Wyatt cut it off as abruptly as he had started it and said good-bye. Calvi himself forgot about Wyatt’s remarks until years later.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Harvey was in Dallas in November 1963,” House Assassinations Committee investigator Dan Hardway, who was assigned by the panel to probe possible CIA connections to JFK’s murder, observed years later. “We considered Harvey to be one of our prime suspects from the very start. He had all the key connections—to organized crime, to the CIA station in Miami where the plots against Castro were run, to other prime CIA suspects like David Phillips. We tried to get Harvey’s travel vouchers and security file from the CIA, but they always blocked us. But we did come across a lot of memos that suggested he was traveling a lot in the months leading up to the assassination.” (More recent legal efforts by the author to obtain Harvey’s travel records from the CIA also proved fruitless, despite the 1992 JFK Records Act, which required all federal agencies to release documents related to the Kennedy assassination.) David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 17 The Parting Glass
If Dulles needed any assurance that he continued to be a power player after he left the CIA, the publication of The Craft of Intelligence delivered it. Hailed by the leading publications, the book became an immediate bestseller and won him speaking invitations before influential audiences up and down the Eastern Seaboard, as well as in California. Dulles was also invited to appear in Texas, where, between October 25 and 29, he met with old friends in Houston and Dallas and spoke before the Dallas Council on World Affairs.
Dulles often used speaking engagements and vacations as covers for serious business, and his detour through Texas bears the markings of such a stratagem. His stopover in Texas stood out as an anomaly in a book tour otherwise dominated by appearances on the two coasts. The spymaster’s date book during his Texas trip typically left out as much as it revealed, with big gaps in his schedule throughout his stay there. But Dulles was wired into the Texas oil industry—for which his law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, had provided legal counsel for many years—as well as into the local political hierarchy, including Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, the younger brother of his former CIA deputy, Charles, a fellow victim of JFK’s post–Bay of Pigs housecleaning. With Kennedy’s trip to Texas just weeks away, the president was a hot topic in these local circles.
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The Texas oil crowd was also furious at Kennedy for moving to close their tax loopholes, particularly the oil depletion allowance, which threatened to cost the oilmen millions—perhaps billions—of dollars a year. This kind of government mischief would have been unthinkable during the Eisenhower-Dulles years. As vice president, Lyndon Johnson—Texas’s native son—was supposed to make sure that the man in the White House didn’t mess with their wealth. But by the fall of 1963, the once-powerful LBJ—former Senate majority leader and master of the backroom deal—was a fading figure in Washington, unable to take care of the oil tycoons who had paved his way to power. “He had promised to protect them,” said petroleum industry lawyer Ed Clark, “and he couldn’t deliver. He couldn’t deliver!”
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Dulles was among those who maintained warm relations with the vice president, even as both men’s stars fell within the Kennedy court. In retirement, the spymaster continued to invite Johnson to Washington functions. And, in the summer of 1963, Johnson hosted Dulles at his ranch in the Texas Hill Country, sixty miles west of Austin. Dulles’s visit to the LBJ Ranch did not appear in his calendar, but it was briefly noted in a syndicated news photo, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune on August 15, that showed the vice president astride a horse, while a beaming Lady Bird and Dulles looked on. Considering how estranged both men were from Kennedy—and how notoriously conniving they were—the picture could only have produced a sense of puzzlement in the White House.
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Saint’s father had always insisted that he had nothing to do with Kennedy’s death, that he was at home in Washington the day of the assassination, not in Dallas, as many JFK researchers alleged. Hunt claimed that he was shopping for ingredients at a Chinese grocery store in Washington, to cook dinner that night with his wife, when the news bulletin about Kennedy came over the car radio. But Saint, who was in the fifth grade at the time, had no memory of his father being home that day when he was let out early from school, or later that evening. And he found his father’s cover story about cooking the Chinese meal, which Hunt told under oath at a trial related to the Kennedy assassination, absurd. “I can tell you that’s the biggest load of crap in the world,” Saint John told Rolling Stone in 2007. “My dad in the kitchen? Chopping vegetables with his wife? I’m so sorry, but that would never happen. Ever.”
His mother told Saint John, around the time of the assassination, that his father had indeed been in Dallas. The mystery of his father’s whereabouts that day would prey on Saint for years. He was determined to engage his father on the subject before it was too late.
By 2003, Howard Hunt was ready to finally talk. He feared that his life was coming to an end, and he was deeply regretful that he had so little to leave his family after all they had endured. For a time, he flirted with the idea of telling all to actor Kevin Costner, who had starred in Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Costner dangled a big financial reward in front of Hunt if he revealed everything he knew about Dallas, but when the money never appeared, Hunt finally dismissed the actor as a “numbskull.” Saint John nonetheless urged his father to continue down the path of full disclosure while he was still of sound mind. He made his plea in a long letter to his father, telling him that it was time to finally reveal what he knew—he “owed it,” wrote Saint, “to himself, the Nation, and his family to leave a legacy of truth instead of doubt.”
Soon afterward, Hunt phoned his son in California and summoned him to Miami. On December 7, 2003, Saint John Hunt flew to Florida—where so much of his father’s secret life had unfolded—to hear his final testament.
When he arrived at his father’s house, at the end of a cul-de-sac in the Biscayne Bay neighborhood, Saint found Hunt in bed, looking frail and washed out. But the old man perked up when he saw his son. He asked Saint to wheel him into the TV room, where they shared some soup for lunch and watched an agitated round of Fox News at the high volume required by the hard-of-hearing Hunt. Finally, Saint broached the subject that he had come to discuss. “Papa, can we talk about my letter?”
Hunt suggested that Saint wheel him back to his bedroom, in case his wife returned. “We don’t want her getting upset by this,” Hunt told his son. “She believes what I told her: that I don’t know anything about JFK’s murder.”
“I think Laura’s very naïve about the darker side of politics,” said Saint John.
“Well, that’s one of the reasons I love her so much,” his father replied.
Then, after making Saint John promise he would never reveal what he was about to tell him without his permission, Hunt launched into a remarkable story of the plot to kill John F. Kennedy. It was—even at this late date in Hunt’s life—still a carefully parsed tale. He clearly was not telling everything he knew—and he seemed to be downplaying his own role in the crime as well as the complicity of former CIA superiors to whom he remained loyal. He also couched much of his narrative in an oddly speculative manner, as if he were not fully certain of the exact configuration of the plot. Nonetheless, what Hunt did tell Saint John that day was stunning enough. Over the following months, the spy elaborated on his story as his health occasionally improved. At one point, Saint brought in an expert on the Kennedy assassination and Watergate—Eric Hamburg, a Los Angeles writer-producer and a former aide to Senator John Kerry—to help videotape interviews with his father.
Laura Hunt ultimately cut short her husband’s extraordinary journey of truth telling with his son. But before Hunt died in 2007, he left behind video interviews, audiotapes, and notes in his own hand—as well as a somewhat revealing memoir called American Spy. Hunt’s confessional trove amounts to a tortured effort to reveal what he knew, while still guarding his family’s sensitivities, old professional loyalties, and whatever was left of his good name. After his father died, Saint John would make a valiant effort to get Hunt’s confessions—which should have been headline news—into the hands of the major media gatekeepers. A 60 Minutes producer spent days poring over Saint John’s rich material, but he was finally forced to apologize that the story had been spiked from above. In the end, only Rolling Stone—along with a scattering of alternative media outlets—covered the story of Howard Hunt’s astonishing final statements about the crime of the century. Saint John’s own memoir of his father’s escapades and his family’s ordeal, Bond of Secrecy, was released by a small Oregon publisher and received little promotion or attention.
This was the story that Howard Hunt left behind. Sometime in 1963, Hunt said, he was invited to a meeting at one of the CIA safe houses in Miami by Frank Sturgis, a soldier of fortune who had worked under Hunt in the anti-Castro underground—a man with whom Hunt would be forever linked when they were later arrested for the Watergate break-in. Also in attendance at the Miami meeting was David Morales, another CIA veteran of the anti-Castro campaign who was well known to Hunt. Morales—a big, intimidating man who had grown up in a poor Mexican American family in Phoenix—did not fit the polished CIA profile. But the agency found a use for “El Indio”—as Morales, with his strong indigenous features, was known by his colleagues.
“Dave Morales did dirty work for the agency,” according to Wayne Smith, a diplomat who worked alongside Morales in the U.S. embassy in Havana before Castro took power. “If he were in the mob, he’d be called a hit man.”
Thomas Clines, a colleague of Morales’s in the CIA’s Miami station, was more complimentary in his description, but it amounted to the same thing: “We all admired the hell out of the guy. He drank like crazy, but he was bright as hell. He could fool people into thinking he was stupid by acting stupid, but he knew about cultural things all over the world. People were afraid of him. He was big and aggressive, and he had this mystique. Stories about him permeated the agency. If the agency needed someone action-oriented, he was at the top of the list. If the U.S. government as a matter of policy needed someone or something neutralized, Dave would do it, including things that were repugnant to a lot of people.”
Ruben Carbajal, Morales’s lifelong friend from their boyhood days on the streets of Phoenix, was even more blunt about “Didi”—the man who was like a brother to him: “When some asshole needed to be killed, Didi was the man to do it. . . . That was his job.”
According to Morales’s daughter, he was the CIA’s “peon.” Her father was utterly devoted to the agency. “He did whatever he was told. They gave him a lifestyle that he would never have had under any circumstances. . . . He did everything for the Company. His family wasn’t his life—the Company was his life.”
At the secret Miami meeting, Morales told Hunt that he had been recruited for an “off-the-board” operation by Bill Harvey, with whom El Indio had worked closely on the ZR/Rifle project to kill Castro. The aim of this “off-the-board” operation, it soon became clear, was to assassinate President Kennedy. Morales and Sturgis referred to the president’s planned demise as “the big event.”
In his account of the meeting, Hunt presented Harvey and Morales as the key operational figures in the plot; Harvey did not attend the meeting but seemed to loom over it. Hunt suggested that Harvey was in charge of hiring the sharpshooters to kill Kennedy and transporting the weapons to Dallas. According to Hunt, the gunmen were likely recruited from the Corsican underworld. As Harvey once indicated, when it came to highly delicate assignments, working with Corsican gangsters was preferable because they were harder to trace back to the CIA than Italian or American Mafia hit men.
Hunt found Harvey and Morales to be disturbing characters. The two men “could have been manufactured from the same cloth,” Hunt wrote in his memoir. “Both were hard-drinking, tough guys, possibly completely amoral. Morales was rumored to be a cold-blooded killer, the go-to guy in black ops situations where the government needed to have someone neutralized. I tried to cut short any contact with him, as he wore thin very quickly.”
To Morales, Kennedy was “that no good son of a bitch motherfucker” who was responsible for the deaths of the men he had trained for the Bay of Pigs mission. “We took care of that son of a bitch, didn’t we?” Morales told his attorney, Robert Walton, in 1973, after an evening of drinking loosened the CIA hit man’s tongue. It was one more confession that the media ignored, even after it was reported by one of their own, Gaeton Fonzi, a Philadelphia investigative journalist who, after going to work for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, unearthed some of the most important information related to the Kennedy case.
Hunt might have been wary of men like Harvey and Morales, but he shared their venomous attitudes toward President Kennedy. Toward the end of the Miami meeting, Sturgis made the group’s pitch to Hunt: “You’re somebody we all look up to. . . . We know how you feel about the man [Kennedy]. Are you with us?”
Hunt told the group his main reservation about joining them. It was a tactical concern, not a moral one. “Look,” he told Sturgis, “if Bill Harvey has anything to do with this, you can count me out. The man is an alcoholic and a psycho.” Sturgis laughed. “You’re right—but that SOB has the balls to do it.”
As Hunt related his story to his son, he remained fuzzy about his own involvement in the plot. In the end, he said, he played only a peripheral “benchwarmer” role in the killing of Kennedy. It was Bill Harvey who was the quarterback, according to Hunt. Despite Harvey’s reputation for hard drinking, the agency’s assassination chief had the experience and connections to pull off something like “the big event.” While assembling his Castro assassination team, Harvey had reached out to a variety of underworld professionals, including (with Helms’s permission) the infamous European assassin code-named QJ-WIN, whom the CIA had recruited to kill Patrice Lumumba. And Harvey was well positioned as Rome station chief to once again plumb the European underworld for a Dallas killing team.
In fact, among the strange and murderous characters who converged on Dallas in November 1963 was a notorious French OAS commando named Jean Souetre, who was connected to the plots against President de Gaulle. Souetre was arrested in Dallas after the Kennedy assassination and expelled to Mexico. Souetre’s expulsion brought an urgent inquiry from French intelligence officials to the CIA about the dangerous outlaw’s likely whereabouts, since de Gaulle was about to travel to Mexico for a state visit.
Hunt’s speculations about the Kennedy conspiracy were in line with the suspicions of the House Assassinations Committee. When the congressional inquiry got under way in 1976, the panel’s most energetic investigators zeroed in on the CIA’s anti-Castro operation as the nest from which the JFK plot had sprung—and Bill Harvey soon emerged as a prime suspect.
“We tried to get Harvey’s travel vouchers and security file from the CIA, but we were never able to,” recalled Dan Hardway. Hardway was the bright Cornell Law School student to whom the congressional committee gave the weighty task of investigating the CIA’s possible links to the assassination. “One CIA official told me, ‘So you’re from Congress—what the hell is that to us? You’ll be packed up and gone in a couple years, and we’ll still be here.’
“But we did come across documents that suggested Harvey was traveling a lot in the weeks leading up to the assassination, while he was supposed to be running the Rome station. . . . Near the end of our investigation, I typed up a memo, making my case against Harvey as a leading figure in the crime. I typed it up in the committee’s secure room, on the yellow security paper with a purple border marked ‘Top Secret.’ That memo has since disappeared.”
While the Miami conspirators made it clear that Bill Harvey was playing a central role in “the big event,” they assured Hunt that the chain of command went much higher than Harvey. Vice President Johnson himself had signed off on the plot, Morales insisted. Hunt found this plausible. As he observed in his memoir, “Lyndon Johnson was an opportunist who would not hesitate to get rid of any obstacles in his way.”
Hunt was mindful of Washington’s strict “caste system,” but he was convinced that “Harvey’s rank and position was such that a vice president could talk to him.”
This is where Hunt began to obfuscate. There is no evidence that Lyndon Johnson and Bill Harvey were ever in close contact, and, in fact, the two men’s “rank and position” were disparate enough to make such communication unlikely. It is simply not credible that a man in Johnson’s position would have discussed something as extraordinarily sensitive as the removal of the president with a man who occupied Harvey’s place in the national security hierarchy.
The man Johnson did know best in the intelligence world was Allen Dulles. Unlike Harvey, Dulles had the stature and the clout to assure a man like LBJ that the plot had the high-level support it needed to be successful.
Howard Hunt was fully aware of the seating arrangements at the Washington power table. He knew, in fact, that Dulles outranked Johnson in this rarefied circle. Hunt undoubtedly realized that the vice president might be a passive accessory, or even an active accomplice, in what would be the crime of the century. But Johnson was certainly not the mastermind. And yet, loyal to the end, even on his deathbed Hunt could not bring himself to name Dulles—that “remarkable man,” as Hunt once gushed, whom it had been his “honor” to serve.
In his memoir, Hunt engaged in a kind of sleight of hand, hypothesizing about the likely identities of the conspirators, as if he didn’t know for certain. But in his communications with Saint John, Hunt was more emphatic about the plotters. In addition to Harvey and Morales, the names David Atlee Phillips and Cord Meyer figured prominently in Hunt’s “speculations.”
Phillips was the CIA counterintelligence specialist who had worked closely with Hunt on the Guatemala coup and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Like Harvey and Morales, Phillips did not belong to the Ivy League elite. The Texas-born, roughly handsome, chain-smoking Phillips had been a nose gunner during World War II, not an OSS gentleman spy. After the war, he rambled around Latin America, trying his hand at acting and publishing before being recruited into the CIA. His covert work won the admiration of Helms, who made him chief of the agency’s Cuba operations after Harvey was whisked off to Rome to escape Bobby Kennedy’s wrath. In that position, Phillips was free to roam within the “yeasty” world of anti-Castro and anti-Kennedy ferment, as Senator Gary Hart later described it.
Meyer belonged to the agency’s Georgetown set. At Yale, he had dreamed of a writing career and—after returning from the war in the South Pacific, partly blinded by a Japanese grenade—he devoted himself for a time to the cause of world peace. But after he was initiated into the spy fraternity—where he fell under the spell of Jim Angleton—he became chief of the CIA’s culture war, secretly dispersing cash to the literary types whose ranks he once imagined joining. After his beautiful, artistic wife, Mary, left him, Meyer became an increasingly embittered Cold Warrior—and his disposition grew only gloomier when she became a mistress of JFK.
Hunt carefully refrained from naming Dulles in his confessions, but nearly every CIA official whom he implicated led directly to the Old Man. Dulles had recruited them or promoted them or given them the agency’s most delicate assignments. Meyer was particularly beholden to Dulles, who had saved his career in 1953, when Joe McCarthy tried to purge the agency of those agents who had once been youthful idealists. In the fall of 1963, during the weeks leading up to the Kennedy assassination, Meyer was a guest at Dulles’s home on more than one occasion—along with another important member of Angleton’s shop, Jim Hunt (no relation to Howard), and Angleton himself.
Howard Hunt might have been wary about joining a JFK plot managed by Bill Harvey. But if he knew that Allen Dulles was at the top of the chain of command, that would have instilled in him all the confidence he needed. Despite his coyness about his own role, some felt that Hunt had been much more than a “benchwarmer.” At one point, the CIA itself seemed poised to make Hunt the fall guy in the crime. In the 1970s, as congressional investigators inched uncomfortably close to some of the CIA’s most disturbing secrets, Hunt’s own colleagues seriously considered throwing him to the wolves.
In August 1978, as the House Select Committee on Assassinations entered the final stage of its probe, a former CIA official named Victor Marchetti published an eye-opening article in The Spotlight, a magazine put out by the right-wing Liberty Lobby whose pages often reflected the noxious views of the group’s eccentric founder, Willis Carto. Marchetti wrote that CIA officials had decided that if the assassinations committee crept too close to the truth, the agency was prepared to scapegoat Hunt and some of his sidekicks, such as Sturgis. “[Hunt’s] luck has run out, and the CIA has decided to sacrifice him to protect its clandestine services,” Marchetti wrote. “The agency is furious with Hunt for having dragged it publicly into the Nixon mess and for having blackmailed it after he was arrested. Besides, Hunt is vulnerable—an easy target as they say in the spy business. His reputation and integrity have been destroyed. . . . In the public hearings, the CIA will ‘admit’ that Hunt was involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy. The CIA may go so far as to ‘admit’ that there were three gunmen shooting at Kennedy.”
Marchetti described this CIA plan as a classic “limited hangout” strategy—spy jargon for releasing some of the hidden facts, in order to distract the public from bigger, more explosive information. While The Spotlight was a sketchy publication, Marchetti himself had credibility. A former Soviet military specialist for the CIA, he had risen to become a special assistant to Helms before resigning in 1969 over disagreements with agency policy. In 1973, Marchetti wrote a critique of the agency, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, which the agency forced his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, to heavily censor. But Marchetti remained a CIA loyalist at heart, and he retained strong ties to the agency.
In the ensuing uproar over the Spotlight article, Hunt sued for defamation of character, insisting that he had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination, but he ultimately lost his court case. The Liberty Lobby’s attorney, famed JFK researcher Mark Lane, succeeded in convincing the jury that Hunt might indeed have been in Dallas, as his own son came to believe.
During the trial, Lane uncovered the surprising identities of Marchetti’s sources: Jim Angleton and William Corson, a former Marine officer who had served with Dulles’s son in Korea and later worked for the spymaster. Marchetti was clearly a conduit for the deep rumblings from within Langley. His article was a fascinating window into the CIA’s organizational psychology during a period of the agency’s greatest distress.
Marchetti himself was troubled by the unanswered questions swirling around the Kennedy assassination. “This is a thing in my mind that is not 100 percent certain—there is that two to three percent that remains open,” he said. And much of Marchetti’s suspicion focused on Hunt. “He might have been down there [in Dallas] for some other reason, but . . . who knows?” Some of the evidence about Hunt that came out during the Liberty Lobby trial, added Marchetti, “was just very, very strange.”
As the CIA prepared its “limited hangout” strategy on the Kennedy assassination, Hunt was not the only officer considered “expendable” by the agency. Bill Harvey, too, felt that he was being hung out to dry when he was subpoenaed by the Church Committee to testify about the CIA’s assassination plots against foreign leaders. Word circulated in Washington that Harvey had gone “rogue.” Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, it was whispered, he had gone off the rails during his exploits in the espionage wilderness—his thinking had become unsound. Harvey was very familiar with the CIA’s character assassination machinery, and he now found himself a target of it: he had never been one of the Fifth Avenue cowboys, and now they were turning on him. Long after he was gone, Harvey’s family still resented the CIA high command for how they had treated him. They “threw him under the bus,” in the words of his daughter, Sally.
Harvey’s widow, CG, was bitterly aware of the CIA class system. “Bill always had very good opportunities for travel and learning,” she said, still defending her late husband against the agency prejudices. “And for these people to turn up their noses and say that Bill was from nothing, just because he graduated in law school at Indiana University, always made me feel that they were jealous and that they really couldn’t carry his briefcase when it came to intelligence. . . . Bill gave his life to his country.”
All the stories that came spilling out of the agency about Harvey’s wild ways—his love of guns, his fondness for birdbath-size martinis, his eruptions of black fury at the Kennedys—they were all meant to show that he was the type who could blow his top and do anything. But Harvey’s consistently glowing CIA fitness reports tell a different story. There was nothing rogue about Bill Harvey in these pages—he was portrayed as a dedicated and highly valued professional. Even after Harvey had enraged Bobby Kennedy with his Cuban antics, he continued to win enthusiastic reviews from his superiors. “It is difficult to prepare a fitness report on this outstanding officer, largely because forms do not lend themselves to measuring his many unique characteristics,” began Harvey’s October 1962 report, which cited his “professional knowledge . . . toughness of mind and firmness of attitude.” Harvey, the report concluded, “is one of the few distinctly outstanding officers” in the CIA’s action arm.
Likewise, after the violently inclined Harvey alarmed F. Mark Wyatt, his Rome deputy, so severely that Wyatt asked to be transferred home, Harvey’s performance continued to be rated “outstanding” by agency officials. Harvey’s March 1965 report commended “his determination to accomplish his basic objectives regardless of the obstacles which he encounters.” The Rome station “must be guided with a strong hand,” the report continued, “which Mr. Harvey is well able to supply.” Dick Helms had sent Wyatt to Rome to help keep an eye on Harvey. But when Wyatt was recalled to Langley and told Helms about the extreme methods that Harvey was employing in Rome, the CIA did nothing to discipline Harvey. Instead, it was Wyatt who found his career stalled.
Harvey always vehemently denied that he was a reckless maverick. Testifying before the Church Committee, he insisted that he had never done anything that was “unauthorized, freewheeling or in any way outside the framework of my responsibilities and duties as an officer of the agency.” The truly alarming thing is that Harvey was probably telling the truth. But the men who had authorized his extreme actions were quite willing for him to take the blame. Like Hunt, he was “an easy target” for the spymasters.
Bill Harvey and Howard Hunt both prided themselves on being part of the CIA’s upper tier. But that’s not how these men were viewed at the top of the agency. Hunt liked to brag that he had family connections to Wild Bill Donovan himself, who had admitted him into the OSS, the original roundtable of American intelligence. But it turned out that Hunt’s father was a lobbyist in upstate New York to whom Donovan owed a favor, not a fellow Wall Street lawyer. Everyone knew Hunt was a writer, but they also knew he was no Ian Fleming.
Hunt didn’t figure out how these men really saw him until it was much too late. “I thought—mistakenly—that I was dealing with honorable men,” he said near the end of his life.
To the Georgetown set, there would always be something low-rent about men like Hunt—as well as Harvey and Morales. The CIA was a cold hierarchy. Men like this would never be invited for lunch with Dulles at the Alibi Club or to play tennis with Dick Helms at the Chevy Chase Club. These men were indispensable—until they became expendable.
Hunt, Harvey, and Morales were among the expendable men sent to Dallas in November 1963. But the most expendable of all was a young ex-marine with a perplexing past named Lee Harvey Oswald. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 18 The Big Event
In the last years of his life, de Mohrenschildt sought atonement for his sins, to make it right with the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald. In his memoir, I Am a Patsy!—an outpouring from the heart whose raw, Russian-accented syntax de Mohrenschildt did not bother to polish—he apologized for the “damage” he had caused “to the memory of Lee, my dear friend.” He proclaimed Oswald’s innocence and took back the damning things he had told the Warren Commission. In truth, “Lee was not jealous of [the] Kennedys’ wealth,” he wrote, “and did not envy their social positions, of that I was sure. To him wealth and society were big jokes, but he did not resent them.”
De Mohrenschildt had described Oswald to the Warren Commission as a “semi-educated hillbilly”—someone “you can’t take seriously . . . you just laugh at.” But now, he wrote of his late friend’s “original mind” and his “nonconformist” thinking. Along with the Titovets chronicle, I Am a Patsy! stands out as the most convincing portrait we have of the true Oswald. De Mohrenschildt’s manuscript, which his wife gave to the House Select Committee on Assassinations after his death, remains unpublished but is available online.
Oswald comes across in the baron’s memoir as a budding ’60s radical—a man sensitive enough to identify with the plight of black Americans and Native Americans in a white-dominated society, and hardheaded enough to recognize the fundamental flaws of American democracy. “Under dictatorship, people are enslaved but they know it,” he told de Mohrenschildt, recalling his days in the Soviet Union. “Here, the politicians constantly lie to people and they become immune to these lies because they have the privilege of voting. But voting is rigged and democracy here is a gigantic profusion of lies and clever brainwashing.” Oswald worried about the FBI’s police-state surveillance tactics. And he believed that America was turning more “militaristic” as it increasingly interfered in the internal affairs of other countries. Someday, he predicted, there would be a coup d’état.
As de Mohrenschildt contemplated America in the mid-1970s, when he wrote his manuscript, he began to regard Oswald as a prophetic figure. By then, the United States was a country debased by war, assassination, government corruption, and constitutional subversion. “My wife and I spent many an agonizing moment thinking of Lee, ashamed that we did not stand up more decisively in his defense,” he wrote. “But who would have listened to us at the time and would have published anything true and favorable [about] him?”
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By the following March, the sixty-five-year-old de Mohrenschildt was separated from his wife, struggling with depression, and living with family friends in a wooden bungalow tucked between the more luxurious mansions that stretched south of Palm Beach. His testimony was once again in demand—this time from the House Select Committee on Assassinations, whose investigators were showing a keener interest in the truth than the Warren panel had. On the morning of March 29, 1977, committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi rolled up outside the dark-shingled beach house, and when told that de Mohrenschildt was not at home, the congressional staffer left his card with the baron’s daughter, Alexandra. Early that evening, after returning to his Miami motel room, Fonzi got a call from Bill O’Reilly, who was working in those days as a Dallas TV reporter. O’Reilly had some stunning news. George de Mohrenschildt had been found dead at home, his head blown apart by the blast from a 20-gauge shotgun. Fonzi’s card was found in the dead man’s pocket. (In his 2012 book, Killing Kennedy, O’Reilly exaggerated his personal involvement in the drama, placing himself on de Mohrenschildt’s doorstep as the shotgun blast rang out. As subsequent news reports pointed out, O’Reilly was actually in Dallas at the time.)
The Palm Beach County coroner ruled de Mohrenschildt’s death a suicide, but his violent demise incited heated public speculation for a time. His death came amid a flurry of other sudden exits during that season of renewed congressional inquiry into the Kennedy case. Witnesses succumbed to heart attacks and suicides, or were dispatched in more dramatic ways—as in the case of Mafia-CIA go-between Johnny Rosselli, who was garroted, chopped up, stuffed into an oil drum, and dumped in Biscayne Bay. Some investigators felt the rising mortality rate of Kennedy witnesses was connected to the creeping dread in Washington that justice was finally to be done.
Was de Mohrenschildt murdered before he could begin talking to the House Assassinations Committee? Or did he take his own life, in atonement for what he had done with it? Either way, he was one more victim of the past. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 19 The Fingerprints of Intelligence
Oswald further signaled that he was part of an intelligence operation by trying to make an intriguing phone call shortly before midnight East Coast time on Saturday, November 23. The police switchboard operator, who was being closely monitored by two unidentified officials, told Oswald there was no answer, though she actually did not put through the call. It was not until years later that independent researchers traced the phone number that Oswald tried to call to a former U.S. Army intelligence officer in Raleigh, North Carolina. CIA veteran Victor Marchetti, who analyzed the Raleigh call in his book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, surmised that Oswald was likely following his training guidelines and reaching out to his intelligence handler. “[He] was probably calling his cut-out. He was calling somebody who could put him in touch with his case officer.”
The Raleigh call probably sealed Oswald’s fate, according to Marchetti. By refusing to play the role of the “patsy” and instead following his intelligence protocol, Oswald made clear that he was trouble. What would be the CIA procedure at this point, Marchetti was asked by North Carolina historian Grover Proctor, who has closely studied this episode near the end of Oswald’s life? “I’d kill him,” Marchetti replied. “Was this his death warrant?” Proctor continued. “You betcha,” Marchetti said. “This time, [Oswald] went over the dam, whether he knew it or not. . . . He was over the dam. At this point it was executive action.”
Oswald was not just alive on the afternoon of November 22, 1963; he was likely innocent. This was another major problem for the organizers of the assassination. Even close legal observers of the case who continue to believe in Oswald’s guilt—such as Bob Blakey who, after serving on the House Assassinations Committee, became a law professor at Notre Dame University—acknowledge that a “credible” case could have been made for Oswald’s innocence based on the evidence. (The 1979 congressional report found that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy involving Oswald and other unknown parties.) Other legal experts, like San Francisco attorney and Kennedy researcher Bill Simpich, have gone further, arguing that the case against Oswald was riddled with such glaring inconsistencies that it would have quickly unraveled in court.
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Robert Kennedy was not the only one in Washington who immediately sensed a conspiracy behind the killing of his brother. The nation’s capital was filled with edgy chatter about the assassination. Talking on the phone with Kennedy family confidant Bill Walton, Agnes Meyer, the outspoken mother of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, snapped, “What is this—some kind of goddam banana republic?” Eisenhower, retired on his Gettysburg farm, had the same reaction. He remarked that the bloodshed in Dallas reminded him of his tour of duty in Haiti as a young Army major; when he visited the national palace in Port-au-Prince, he was shocked to realize that two-thirds of the former heads of state whose marble busts were on display had been slain in office.
Meanwhile, down in Independence, Missouri, another retired president, Harry Truman, was fuming about the CIA. On December 22, 1963, while the country was still reeling from the gunfire in Dallas, Truman published a highly provocative op-ed article in The Washington Post, charging that the CIA had grown alarmingly out of control since he established it. His original purpose, wrote Truman, was to create an agency that simply coordinated the various streams of sensitive information flowing into the White House. “I have never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations,” he continued. But “for some time, I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of Government.” The CIA had grown “so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.” But the increasingly powerful agency did not just menace foreign governments, Truman warned—it now threatened democracy at home. “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position [as a] free and open society,” he concluded ominously, “and I feel that we need to correct it.”
The timing of Truman’s opinion piece was striking. Appearing in the capital’s leading newspaper exactly one month after the assassination, the article caused shock waves in political circles. There was a disturbing undertone to the straight-talking midwesterner’s warning about the CIA. Was Truman implying that there was “sinister and mysterious intrigue” behind Kennedy’s death? Could that have been what he meant when he suggested that the agency represented a growing danger to our own democracy?
Overseas, the speculation about Kennedy’s murder—and the suspicious shooting of his alleged assassin—was even more rampant. The foreign press was filled with commentary suggesting that there were powerful forces involved in the assassination and naming Cold War militarists, big business, and Texas oilmen as possible culprits. Some of this coverage, unsurprisingly, came from Soviet bloc newspapers, eager to dispel the rumors that Oswald was part of a Communist plot—rumors that were often traceable to CIA propaganda shops. But much of the conjecture about Dallas came from publications in the Western European alliance. In Hamburg, the daily Die Welt editorialized that the official handling of the Kennedy and Oswald cases left a “forest of question marks.” In London, the Daily Mail spoke of “whispers” that Oswald was a fall guy who was rubbed out, and the Daily Telegraph derided Police Chief Curry’s announcement that Oswald’s death put a close to the Kennedy case as a “monumental absurdity.” And in Italy, where the limitations of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle were well known to a generation of World War II veterans, the newspaper Corriere Lombardo observed that there was no way Oswald could have used the bolt-action weapon to squeeze off three shots in six seconds, as official reports from Dallas were claiming.
Suspicions of a conspiracy were particularly strong in France, where President de Gaulle himself had been the target of CIA machinations and had survived a barrage of gunfire on his own limousine. After returning from Kennedy’s November 24 funeral in Washington, de Gaulle gave a remarkably candid assessment of the assassination to his information minister, Alain Peyrefitte. “What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me,” confided the French president. “His story is the same as mine. . . . It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS [Secret Army Organization] story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.”
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After the Bay of Pigs, Truman had confided in writer Merle Miller that he regretted ever establishing the CIA. “I think it was a mistake,” he said. “And if I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it. . . . [Eisenhower] never paid any attention to it, and it got out of hand. . . . It’s become a government all of its own and all secret. . . . That’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society.” Likewise, after the Washington Post essay ran, Truman’s original CIA director, Admiral Sidney Souers—who shared his former boss’s limited concept of the agency—congratulated him for writing the piece. “I am happy as I can be that my article on the Central Intelligence Agency rang a bell with you because you know why the organization was set up,” Truman wrote back to Souers.
In a letter that Truman wrote to Look magazine managing editor William Arthur in June 1964—two months after his meeting with Dulles—the ex-president again articulated his concerns about the direction taken by the CIA after he left the White House. “The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President,” wrote Truman. “It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.”
Dulles’s relentless effort to manipulate Truman—and failing that, the Truman record—is yet one more example of the spymaster’s “strange activities.” But Dulles’s greatest success at reconstructing reality was still to come. With the Warren Report, Dulles would literally rewrite history. The inquest into the death of John F. Kennedy was another astounding sleight of hand on Dulles’s part. The man who should have been in the witness chair wound up instead in control of the inquiry.
How did Allen Dulles—a man fired by President Kennedy under bitter circumstances—come to oversee the investigation into his murder? This crucial historical question has been the subject of misguided speculation for many years. The story apparently began with Lyndon Johnson, a man not known for his devotion to the truth. It has been repeated over time by various historians, including Johnson biographer Robert Caro, who one would think would be more skeptical, considering the exhaustive detail with which he documented LBJ’s habitual deceit in his multivolume work.
In his 1971 memoir, Johnson wrote that he appointed Dulles and John McCloy to the Warren Commission because they were “the two men Bobby Kennedy asked me to put on it.” With Bobby safely dead by 1971, LBJ clearly felt that he could get away with this one. But the idea that LBJ would huddle with the man he considered his rival and tormentor, in order to discuss the politically sensitive composition of the commission, is ludicrous.
The Warren Commission’s inquiry had the ability to shake the new Johnson presidency—and the U.S. government itself—to their very core. In making his choices for the commission, Johnson later wrote, he sought “men who were known to be beyond pressure and above suspicion.” What LBJ really wanted was men who could be trusted to close the case and put the public’s suspicions to rest. The Warren Commission was not established to find the truth but to “lay the dust” that had been stirred up in Dallas, as McCloy stated—“dust not only in the United States, but all over the world.”
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Despite the chronic tensions between the CIA and FBI, Hoover proved a useful partner of the spy agency during the JFK inquiry. The FBI chief knew that his organization had its own secrets to hide related to the assassination, including its contacts with Oswald. Furthermore, taking its cues from the CIA, the bureau had dropped Oswald from its watch list just weeks before the assassination. An angry Hoover would later mete out punishment for errors such as this, quietly disciplining seventeen of his agents. But the FBI director was desperate to avoid public censure, and he fully supported the commission’s lone-gunman story line. Angleton, who had a good back-channel relationship with the FBI, made sure that the two agencies stayed on the same page throughout the Warren inquest, meeting regularly with bureau contacts such as William Sullivan and Sam Papich.
Angleton and his team also provided ongoing support and advice to Dulles. On a Saturday afternoon in March 1964, Ray Rocca—Angleton’s right-hand man ever since their days together in Rome—met with Dulles at his home to mull over a particularly dicey issue with which the commission was grappling. How could the panel dispel persistent rumors that the CIA was somehow a “sponsor” of Oswald’s actions? The story had broken in the press the previous month, when Marguerite Oswald declared that her son was a secret agent for the CIA who was “set up to take the blame” for the Kennedy assassination. Rankin had obligingly suggested that Dulles be given the job of clearing the CIA by reviewing all of the relevant agency documents that were provided to the commission. But even Dulles thought this smacked too much of an inside job. Instead, after conferring with Rocca, Dulles proposed that he simply provide a statement to the commission swearing—as Rocca put it in his report back to Dick Helms—“that as far as he could remember he had never had any knowledge of Oswald at any time prior to the date of the assassination.”
But Senator Cooper thought the allegations that Oswald was some kind of government agent were too serious to simply be dispelled by written statements. During a Warren Commission executive session in April, he proposed that the heads of the CIA and FBI be put under oath and questioned by the panel. It was a highly awkward suggestion, as Dulles pointed out. “I might have a little problem on that—having been [CIA] director until November 1961.” There was a simple solution, however: put his successor, John McCone, on the witness stand. That was fine with Dulles, because—as he knew—McCone remained an agency outsider, despite his title, and was not privy to its deepest secrets.
When McCone appeared before the Warren Commission, he brought along Helms, his chief of clandestine operations. As McCone was well aware, Helms was the man who knew where all the bodies were buried, and he deferred to his number two man more than once during his testimony. Conveniently ignorant of the CIA’s involvement with Oswald, McCone was able to emphatically deny any agency connection to the accused assassin. “The agency never contacted him, interviewed him, talked with him, or received or solicited any reports or information from him,” McCone assured the commission.
It was trickier when Helms was asked the same questions. He knew about the extensive documentary record that Angleton’s department had amassed on Oswald. He was aware of how the agency had monitored the defector during his exploits in Dallas, New Orleans, and Mexico City. David Phillips—a man whose career was nurtured by Helms—had been spotted meeting with Oswald in Dallas. But when Helms was sworn in, he simply lied. There was no evidence of agency contact with Oswald, he testified. Had the agency provided the commission with all the information it had on Oswald, Rankin asked him. “We have—all,” Helms replied, though he knew the files that he had handed over were thoroughly purged.
Helms was “the man who kept the secrets,” in the words of his biographer, Thomas Powers. Commission staff attorney Howard Willens politely called him “one of the most fluent and self-confident government officials I ever met.” Helms was the sort of man who could tell lies with consummate ease. It would eventually win him a felony conviction, and he wore it like a badge of courage. When one was defending the nation, Helms would lecture the senators who pestered him late in his career, one must be granted a certain latitude.
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Dulles and McCloy, in fact, were very concerned about European public opinion regarding the Kennedy assassination, and they urged the commission to closely monitor both Lane and Thomas G. Buchanan, a Paris-based American journalist who had written the first JFK conspiracy book, Who Killed Kennedy?—an advance copy of which was airmailed to Dulles from the CIA station in London, where it was published. During an executive session in April, Dulles even proposed that Buchanan be subpoenaed to appear before the commission.
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If any blame was assigned in the death of the president during Dillon’s gentle interrogation, it was placed on the victim himself. Soon after the assassination, Dillon and others began circulating the false story that Kennedy preferred his Secret Service guards to ride behind him in motorcades, instead of on the side rails of his limousine, and that Kennedy had also requested the Dallas police motorcycle squadron to hang back—so the crowds in Dallas could enjoy an unobstructed view of the glamorous first couple. This clever piece of disinformation had the insidious effect of absolving the Secret Service and indicting Kennedy, implying that his vanity was his downfall. And with Dulles’s help, Dillon was able to slip this spurious story into the commission record. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 20 For the Good of the Country
In December 1965, a year after the Warren Commission wrapped up its business, Allen Dulles agreed to spend a few days on the Los Angeles campus of the University of California, as a well-paid Regents Scholar lecturer. All he had to do, for what was described as “a princely sum,” was to give a few talks and rub elbows with students in casual settings. Dulles—looking forward to a relaxing winter respite in the California sun—brought Clover with him.
By this point, however, a wide network of Warren Report critics had begun to flourish—men and women from all walks of life, none of them famous (except for Mark Lane, whose CIA-inspired bad press and bullish personality had rendered him notorious). Among these critics of the official story were a poultry farmer, sign salesman, small-town newspaper editor, philosophy professor, legal secretary, civil liberties lawyer, United Nations research analyst, and forensic pathologist. They spent untold hours poring over the most arcane details of the Warren Report, analyzing photos taken during the fateful moments in Dealey Plaza, and tracking down eyewitnesses. Their zeal for the truth would make them the target of unrelenting media mockery, but they were doing the work that the American press had shamefully failed to do—and in many cases, they went about their unsung labors with great skill and discipline.
Among this band of loosely connected independent researchers was a twenty-six-year-old UCLA graduate student in engineering and physics named David Lifton. Lifton had not given the Kennedy investigation much thought—assuming, like most Americans, that the distinguished Warren Commission would get it right—until he happened to attend a Mark Lane lecture one evening in September 1964, around the time the report was released. The grad student went to the lecture on a lark. “For similar reasons I might have listened to an eccentric lecturer that the earth was flat,” he later recalled. But as he took in Lane’s lawyerly presentation that night at the Jan Hus Theater—inside a hulking, old, red-brick church on New York’s Upper East Side—Lifton found it so disturbing that it changed his life forever. Soon afterward, he threw himself into the Kennedy case with an engineer’s passion for detail and precision.
Back in Los Angeles, Lifton plunked down $76 at a local bookstore to buy the entire, twenty-six-volume set of the Warren Report and spent a full year methodically working his way through its contents. He added another dimension to his understanding of the case by reading the best of the conspiracy literature that was starting to emerge, primarily in left-wing publications like The Nation and Liberation, and in more obscure sources like The Minority of One, a cerebral monthly published by a brilliant Auschwitz survivor named Menachem [M.S.] Arnoni that boasted such luminaries as Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling on its editorial board. Lifton further honed his analysis of the assassination by intellectually sparring with Wesley Liebeler—one of the few members of the Warren Commission legal staff to at least consider the possibility that their report was flawed—whom he found teaching law at UCLA.
By the time Allen Dulles arrived at UCLA, David Lifton was ready to do battle. Contacting the student who was acting as Dulles’s host, Lifton passed word that he would like to sit down with the spymaster for a private fifteen-minute interview to discuss the Warren Report. Dulles refused to meet with Lifton alone but did agree to answer his questions in public at a student chat session scheduled for that evening in a dormitory lounge. The student host warned Lifton not to “badger” Dulles. Another Warren Report critic had tried to get the best of Dulles the previous night, the host told Lifton, and the wily old spook had made “mincemeat” of him.
That evening, when Lifton showed up at the Sierra Lounge in Hedrick Hall, he was wracked with anxiety. “I have never been more frightened in my life, in connection with speaking to anyone,” he later wrote Vincent Salandria, a Philadelphia lawyer who had established himself as one of the foremost critics of the Warren Report. Dulles entered the lounge with Clover and the evening’s moderator. He lit up his trademark pipe and leaned back in his chair. Still alert at seventy-two, Dulles scanned the group of forty or so students sitting in chairs arranged in semicircles in front of him, quickly picking out the young man positioned front-row center who had obviously come to duel with him. Lifton had brought along an arsenal of evidence, including two hefty volumes of the Warren Report, a file box filled with documents, and photo exhibits of Dealey Plaza, including copies of the “kill-shot” frames from the Zapruder film. The engineering student had made a point of wearing his best suit, and his friends who accompanied him for moral support were similarly attired. “It was obvious,” he told Salandria, “we were not beatniks of any kind.”
After Dulles wittily deflected a question from a student about the CIA budget, the spymaster suddenly found himself confronted by the earnest, bespectacled student sitting directly in front of him. Lifton, not knowing how long he would be given the floor, leaped right to the heart of the matter, directly challenging the foundation of the Warren Report. “Mr. Dulles,” he began, “one of the most important conclusions of the Warren Commission goes something like this: ‘There was no evidence of a conspiracy—’”
“Wasn’t it, ‘We have found no evidence of conspiracy?’” interrupted Dulles. There was a twinkling charm to his manner, but he made clear that he was prepared to counter Lifton every step of the way.
Undeterred, Lifton plunged forward. Contrary to the commission’s conclusion, he asserted, there was ample evidence to suggest a conspiracy, not least of which was the Zapruder film, which graphically demonstrated that Kennedy’s head was “thrust violently back and to the left by [the fatal] shot.” Lifton knew his law of physics, and the conclusion was unavoidable to him. “This must imply someone was firing from the front.”
Dulles would have none of it. He calmly informed the gathering that he had “examined the film a thousand times” and that what Lifton was saying was simply not true.
At this point Lifton walked over to the evening’s honored guest and began showing him grisly blowups from the Zapruder film. “I know these are not the best reproductions,” said Lifton, but the images were clear enough. Nobody had ever directly confronted Dulles like this before, and the Old Man grew agitated as he glanced at the photos that Lifton had thrust onto his lap.
“Now what are you saying . . . just what are you saying?” Dulles sputtered.
“I’m saying there must be someone up front firing at Kennedy,” Lifton responded.
“Look,” Dulles said, in lecture mode, “there isn’t a single iota of evidence indicating conspiracy. No one says anything like that. . . .”
But now it was Lifton’s turn to school Dulles. Actually, the engineering student informed Dulles, of the 121 witnesses in Dealey Plaza, dozens of them reported hearing or seeing evidence of gunfire from the grassy knoll. “People even saw and smelled smoke.”
“Look, what are you talking about?” fumed the now visibly angry Dulles. “Who saw smoke?”
Lifton began giving the names of witnesses, citing the research done by Harold Feldman, a freelance writer for scientific journals.
“Just who is Harold Feldman?” Dulles scornfully demanded. Lifton informed him that he frequently wrote for The Nation.
This elicited an explosion of derision from Dulles. “The Nation! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.” If Dulles assumed the group of students would join in his mocking laughter, he quickly discovered that he was alone. “It is to the everlasting credit of the students,” Lifton later remarked, “that even if they did not understand the full meaning of the dialogue that was taking place, they did sense the obscenity of that laugh, that it was an attempt to intellectually smear, in disguise, and not one student laughed. Allen Dulles laughed all alone.”
Dulles tried to retrieve the upper hand by making his antagonist look like an obsessive “time hog,” as Lifton put it. “Look,” the distinguished guest said to the group, “I don’t know if you’re really all interested in this, and if you’re not, we’d just as well . . .” But the students emphatically assured him that they were very interested. “No, no,” they insisted, “keep going.”
So with a shrug, Dulles was forced back into the ring. But having failed to knock out Lifton with his display of contempt, he seemed at a loss how to continue the battle. “I can’t see a blasted thing here,” the old spy angrily muttered, taking another look at the hideous photos in his lap. “You can’t say the head goes back. . . . I can’t see it going back . . . it does not go back . . . you can’t say that . . . you haven’t shown it.”
But—after passing the photos around the room—Lifton had the final word. “Each student can look and see for himself,” he told Dulles.
After the heated exchange between Lifton and Dulles, the evening began to wind down. Dulles was given the opportunity to restore some of his dignity when a starstruck student asked a question that allowed him to discourse at length on Cold War spycraft. Then Dulles bade good night to the students, and he and Clover retired to their campus quarters. As Dulles withdrew, dozens of students gathered around Lifton, peppering him with questions about the assassination, and for the next two hours he gave a presentation based on the pile of evidence that he had brought with him. “It was really a neat night,” he reported to Salandria. “I really felt tonight as if I’d won.”
But talking about that evening nearly fifty years later, Lifton conveyed a darker feeling about his encounter with Dulles. He had the sense he was in the presence of “evil” that night, recalled Lifton—who by then was a man in his seventies, like Dulles at the time of their UCLA duel. “It was the way he looked, his eyes. He just emoted guile, and it was very, very scary.”
David Lifton was the only person who ever gave Allen Dulles a taste of what it would have been like for him to be put on the witness stand. No doubt Dulles would have reacted the same way if he had ever been cross-examined. First, he would have tried charm to disarm his prosecutor, then scorn, and finally an eruption of fury—perhaps accompanied by vague threats, as he did with Lifton, when he suggested that the grad student should submit to an FBI interrogation, if he had anything new to report.
Dulles’s performance at UCLA offered a glimpse of how vulnerable the spymaster was underneath all his bluster, and how quickly he might have cracked if he had been subjected to a rigorous examination. But with the failure of Congress and the legal system, as well as the media, to investigate the assassination more closely, it was up to freelance crusaders like Lifton to hold Dulles and his accomplices accountable.
Dulles would be forced to spend the rest of his life grappling with the charges leveled by these headstrong men and women, trying to discredit their books, sabotage their public appearances, and—in some cases—to destroy their reputations. He had written Jerry Ford in February 1965, telling him he was “happy to note” that attacks on the Warren Report “have dwindled to a whimper.” But it was wishful thinking. The whimper of criticism was about to become a roar.
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Much of Dulles’s time during his golden years was absorbed by the growing controversy surrounding the Warren Report. He knew that his legacy was tied to the credibility of the investigation and he took the lead in defending the report, while encouraging other commission pillars to also engage in the propaganda battle. By 1966, Dulles and his commission colleagues found themselves besieged by skeptical reporters and filmmakers, as bestselling books like Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment, Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest, and Harold Weisberg’s Whitewash ripped holes in the Warren Report, soon to be followed by Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas, which was excerpted in the deeply middle-American Saturday Evening Post. Thompson’s book would even land the Haverford philosophy professor-turned-private-eye an editorial consultancy with Luce’s Lifemagazine, which had earlier played a key role in the assassination cover-up by buying the Zapruder film and locking it away in the company vault.
Dulles was particularly disturbed by Inquest, a methodical dissection of the report’s weaknesses that had begun as Epstein’s master’s thesis at Cornell. To their later regret, some commission staff members had cooperated with Epstein’s research, which gave the book more credibility than other attacks on the Warren Report. In July 1966, Dick Goodwin lauded the book in The Washington Post and used his review to call for a reopening of the investigation—a bombshell that marked the first time a member of Kennedy’s inner circle had issued such a call. Alarmed by the steady erosion of support for the Warren Report, Dulles anxiously conferred with Lee Rankin and Arlen Specter, the future senator from Pennsylvania who had been one of the commission’s more ambitious young attorneys, concocting the infamous “magic bullet” theory to reinforce the lone-gunman story line. As the groundswell for a new investigation grew, Dulles realized that a major counteroffensive needed to be mounted. Once again, he rallied his media allies, like U.S. News & World Report founder David Lawrence—whom Dulles described to Rankin as “an old and close friend of mine”—who published a ringing defense of the Warren Report by Specter in October.
The propaganda campaign on behalf of the Warren Report was primarily run out of the CIA by Dulles stalwarts like Angleton and Ray Rocca. A 1967 CIA document, later released under the Freedom of Information Act, stated that growing criticism of the report was “a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization.” In response, the agency sought to provide friendly journalists with “material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists.” One way that its media assets could impugn conspiracy theorists, the CIA suggested, was to portray them as Soviet dupes. “Communists and other extremists always attempt to prove a political conspiracy behind violence,” declared another agency document.
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The Garrison investigation set off alarm bells in CIA headquarters. It soon became clear, however, that the authority of a crusading district attorney was no match for the U.S. intelligence establishment. Days after Garrison sent off the Dulles subpoena to the nation’s capital, he received a letter from the United States attorney in Washington, D.C., who tersely informed the DA that he “declined” to serve the subpoena on Dulles. Meanwhile, the CIA—which, by then, was led by Helms—mounted an aggressive counterattack on the district attorney. Subpoenas like the one sent to Dulles were simply ignored, government records were destroyed, Garrison’s office was infiltrated by spies, and agency assets in the media worked to turn the DA into a crackpot in the public eye. Even the private investigator Garrison hired to sweep his office for electronic bugs turned out to be a CIA operative. After Dulles was subpoenaed by Garrison, the security specialist—Gordon Novel—phoned the spymaster to slip him inside information about the DA’s strategy.
In the end, Garrison’s powerful enemies managed to turn the tables on him, and the New Orleans prosecutor himself became the target of an investigation, on trumped-up federal corruption charges. “This is what happens to you,” he observed years later, “when you do not go along with the new government’s ratification of the coup.”
Despite the public’s overwhelming rejection of the Warren Report, Dulles could count on the unwavering support of the Washington establishment and the corporate media. An exchange of letters between CBS news director William Small and Dulles in July 1967 summed up the media’s lockstep allegiance to the official story, no matter how many holes were punched in it by new research. “I hope you had a chance to view the four-part series on the Warren Commission,” wrote Small, referring to his TV network’s massive apologia for the Warren Report. “We are very proud of them and I hope you found them a proper display of what television journalism can do.” Dulles commended Small for a job well done, although he noted that he had missed the third installment. After reviewing transcripts of the entire series that Small had obligingly provided him, Dulles assured the CBS news executive, “If I have any nitpicking to pass on to you, I shall do so as soon as I have read them.” The spymaster was always happy to offer guidance to his media friends, down to the smallest details.
Even the prominent group of men who had served President Kennedy were loath to break ranks with the establishment on the Warren Report. Dark talk of conspiracy had begun circulating within the Kennedy ranks immediately after Dallas, but with the exception of Dick Goodwin, no one dared to voice these suspicions in public.
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Schlesinger’s early resignation from the Johnson administration—which came seven months before Bobby Kennedy’s own departure, to run for the Senate—solidified his position of trust within the Kennedy enclave. The historian was the recipient of murmured confidences, from Bobby, Jackie, and members of their entourage. Schlesinger heard disturbing reports about the events in Dallas. RFK told him that he was wracked with suspicions about what had happened to his brother. Even CIA director McCone thought “there were two people involved in the shooting,” Kennedy confided to Schlesinger. Meanwhile, Air Force general Godfrey McHugh, who had served as JFK’s military aide in Dallas, gave Schlesinger a harrowing account of “that ghastly afternoon” when they bumped into each other at a French embassy party in June. McHugh had found LBJ huddled in the bathroom of his private quarters on Air Force One before the plane took off from Dallas. The panic-stricken Johnson was “convinced that there was a conspiracy and that he would be the next to go.”
Schlesinger took an interest in the first wave of Kennedy conspiracy articles that began appearing in the press, sending RFK a piece titled “Seeds of Doubt” from the December 21, 1963, issue of The New Republic. Nobody was more aware than Schlesinger of the explosive tensions that had surged within the Kennedy presidency. “Certainly we did not control the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” the historian would acknowledge late in his life. And, as he knew from his futile efforts to reform the CIA, the Kennedy White House perhaps had even less control over the spy agency. But despite Schlesinger’s inside knowledge of the Washington power struggle during the Kennedy years—and his ability to see through such shoddy work as the Warren Report—the historian did nothing to explore the truth about Dallas. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 21 “I Can’t Look and Won’t Look”
The astute writer and political activist M. S. Arnoni, in fact, drew such a chilling scenario in a December 1963 article he published in The Minority of One, a publication to which Kennedy’s Senate office subscribed: “To move against such formidable conspirators might start a disastrous chain of events. It could lead to American troops shooting at other American troops. It could lead to a direct take-over by a military clique. To avert such catastrophes, it might well be considered prudent to pretend utter ignorance, in the hope that the conspirators might be removed from power discreetly, at a later date, one by one.”
And so, for the most part, Bobby Kennedy maintained a pained silence on the subject of his brother’s assassination. In private, he dismissed the Warren Report as a public relations exercise. But he knew that if he attacked the report in public, it would set off a political uproar that he was in no position to exploit. When the report was released in late September 1964, Bobby was on the Senate campaign trail in New York. He tried to avoid commenting at length on the report by canceling his campaign appearances that morning. He was obliged to issue a brief statement, giving the inquiry his perfunctory blessing, but adding, “I have not read the report, nor do I intend to.” It was an impossible balancing act that Bobby would strain to make work for the rest of his life.
The CIA used Kennedy’s silence to bolster the Warren Report. “Note that Robert Kennedy . . . would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy,” the CIA instructed friendly journalists in its 1967 memo on how to rebut critics of the report.
But by 1967, emboldened by the growing campaign to reopen the JFK case and Jim Garrison’s investigation, Bobby began to refocus on Dallas. Before, he had deflected friends’ efforts to discuss their suspicions about the case, but now he tentatively began probing the agonizing wound. After seeing Garrison’s face on a magazine cover at an airport newsstand, the senator turned to his press aide, Frank Mankiewicz, and asked him to begin reading all of the assassination literature he could find—“so if it gets to a point where I can do something about this, you can tell me what I need to know.” Meanwhile, Kennedy sent his trusted friend and longtime investigator, former FBI agent Walter Sheridan, to New Orleans to size up Garrison’s operation. The buttoned-down ex-G-man took an immediate disliking to the flamboyant DA and reported back to Bobby that Garrison was a fraud. Sheridan’s take on Garrison—which was reflected in the harsh NBC News special that Sheridan helped produce in June—foiled Garrison’s efforts to build an investigative alliance with RFK.
The Garrison camp implored Kennedy to speak out about the conspiracy, arguing that such a public stand might even protect his own life by putting the conspirators on notice. But RFK preferred to play such deeply crucial matters close to the chest. He would reopen the case on his own terms, Kennedy confided to his closest aides—suggesting that day would come only if he won the executive powers of the White House.
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Oh, God, not again.” That was the collective moan that erupted from deep within the crowd at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel on the night of Kennedy’s victory, as he lay mortally wounded on the grimy floor of the hotel pantry. As in Dallas, official reports immediately pinned sole responsibility for the shooting on a troubled loner, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan. The accused assassin was undeniably involved in the assault on Kennedy as the senator and his entourage made their way through the crowded, dimly lit hotel pantry on the way to a press briefing room. But numerous eyewitnesses—including one of the men who subdued Sirhan—insisted that the alleged assassin could not have fired the shot that killed Kennedy. Sirhan was several feet in front of Kennedy when he began firing with his revolver. But the fatal shot—which struck RFK at point-blank range behind the right ear, penetrating his brain—was fired from behind. Furthermore, evidence indicated that thirteen shots were fired in the pantry that night—five more than the number of bullets that Sirhan’s gun could hold. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner who conducted the autopsy on Kennedy, thought that all of the evidence pointed to a second gunman. “Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy,” Noguchi would flatly state in his 1983 memoir.
Then there was Sirhan himself. Like Oswald, he did not claim credit for the assassination. In fact, from the moment he was taken into custody, he seemed utterly perplexed by the tragedy in which he found himself playing the starring role. The dazed Sirhan had no memory of attacking Kennedy. He struck many observers, including hypnosis experts who interviewed him, as a “Manchurian candidate”—an individual highly susceptible to mind control programming.
A security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar who guided Kennedy into the pantry later fell under suspicion. He was seen pulling his gun as the chaos erupted that night in the cramped passageway. But investigators quickly cleared Cesar, and his gun was never tested. Over the years, Cesar’s possible role in the assassination of Robert Kennedy has been debated by researchers and lawyers associated with the case. Some—like Sirhan’s current legal team—declare that Cesar, if not the actual assassin, played a role in the plot, perhaps helping set up Kennedy as a target.
Others, like investigative journalist Dan Moldea—author of a book on the RFK assassination—insist on the innocence of Cesar, who is still alive. “Gene Cesar is an innocent man who has been wrongly accused in the Robert Kennedy murder case, and any claim to the contrary is simply not true,” Moldea e-mailed the author in 2015, adding that he now acts as the reclusive Cesar’s spokesman and has his power of attorney.
John Meier—a former executive in Howard Hughes’s Las Vegas organization—has tied Cesar to CIA contractor Bob Maheu, who was hired by Hughes to run his Vegas operation in the 1960s. Meier claims he was introduced to Cesar in Las Vegas before the RFK assassination by Jack Hooper, Maheu’s security chief. Meier also stated that after Kennedy’s murder, he was warned by Maheu and Hooper never to mention Cesar’s name or his connection to Maheu. David Talbot "The Devil's Chessboard" 22 End Game
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